With the support from Chung Chi College, the Chinese Music Archive (CMA) was established in 1972 under the leadership of Dr. Dale Craig and Mr. Cheung Sai Bung of the Music Department of the University. With the great effort of Mr. Cheung, and with the timely donation of records and open-reel tapes from Rediffusion Hong Kong, the CMA collection grew rapidly. With further donations from various sources in the past years, CMA has become an important archive on Chinese music, especially music of Hong Kong and Southern China. In 2016, the CMA becomes a unit of the Centre for Chinese Music Studies of the Music Department. Another unit of the Centre is the Chinese Opera Information Centre.

The CMA collection includes books, journals, and a vast variety of audiovisual materials on Chinese music, covering various traditional genres, revolutionary music, and pop music. The CMA aims to serve scholars from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, and overseas. In order to build a digital archive to facilitate teaching and research on Chinese music, the audiovisual materials are digitalized in phases.