From HKJC Scholarships to "Independent Admission": Twenty-Seven Years of CityU's Mainland Undergraduate Intake

In 1998, the Hong Kong Jockey Club committed HK$100 million to fund 80 mainland and 180 local students to study in Hong Kong — the starting point for Hong Kong universities' large-scale admission of mainland undergraduates. Twenty-seven years later, in the 2026 intake, CityU announced it would no longer admit mainland students through the early-batch national unified college entrance examination (gaokao) track, moving instead to fully independent admission. In between lies an evolution from scattered sponsorship to an institutionalised "top-scorer scholarship" system. This article traces the key milestones in CityU's mainland undergraduate admission system in chronological order, and distinguishes clearly between data on the general "Gangpiao" (mainlanders based in Hong Kong) experience and facts specific to CityU admissions.

# Starting point: the 1998 Jockey Club scholarship and the 1999 policy easing

According to publicly available sources^※, in 1998 the Hong Kong Jockey Club committed HK$100 million to establish a scholarship scheme funding mainland and local students to pursue university studies in Hong Kong — the scheme ran for 10 years and funded a total of 180 local and 80 mainland students^※. This was among the earliest documented, named pilot sponsorship programmes before Hong Kong universities began admitting mainland undergraduates on a large, institutionalised scale.

Following this, in 1999^※ the Hong Kong SAR government eased immigration policy for non-local students, permitting mainland students to come to Hong Kong for full-time undergraduate degree programmes — a policy easing that cleared the institutional obstacles for the large-scale admissions that followed.

# 2003: The eight publicly-funded universities, including CityU, approved for self-financed mainland undergraduate admission

2003^※ marked a key turning point. With approval from the Ministry of Education of China, all eight UGC-funded universities in Hong Kong, including CityU, were formally authorised to admit self-financed mainland undergraduates — CityU's mainland admission history began from this point^※. At around the same time, the SAR government introduced several talent policies, including the Admission Scheme for Mainland Talents and Professionals and the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme, which paralleled the universities' self-financed admissions.

CityU was subsequently approved by the Ministry of Education in 2005 for inclusion in the national first-batch key-admission university list^※, initially recruiting in 17 provinces and municipalities including Guangdong, Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang. The planned intake for 2005 was 150, with 193 actually admitted^※; the planned intake for 2006 was 170, with the recruitment area further extended to Yunnan, Guizhou and Jiangxi^※. Though modest in scale, this early set of figures marked CityU's shift from "sporadic sponsorship" to "institutionalised annual admission."

# The "top-scorer scholarship" takes shape: tiers based on gaokao percentile ranking

As CityU's mainland admission became institutionalised, it developed a scholarship system based on automatic evaluation by gaokao percentile ranking, popularly known as the "top-scorer scholarship." According to CityU's official mainland undergraduate admission page^※, the current scholarship has three tiers, all requiring no separate application — every mainland student admitted via the gaokao is automatically considered:

Evaluation also takes into account English proficiency, interview performance and overall qualities, and renewal requires a cumulative GPA meeting the university's specified requirement at the end of each academic year. Where a province or municipality's published gaokao score-ranking tables include policy-based bonus points, CityU awards scholarships based on the post-bonus ranking, but such bonus points are not counted for admission purposes^※ — meaning scholarship evaluation and admission-eligibility review use two different scoring bases, with the former more lenient and the latter stricter.

This "automatic evaluation, no application required" design is, in essence, a recruitment tool CityU uses to compete with mainland top schools for high-achieving candidates — the full-scholarship tier requires ranking in the top 0.1% of the province, meaning that out of every thousand arts or science candidates in a province, only about one qualifies automatically for this tier — a very high bar.

# The "top-scorer scholarship" is not unique to CityU: a comparison with CUHK and others

CityU's "top-scorer scholarship" is not an isolated case, but part of a long-running bidding competition for students among Hong Kong's eight publicly-funded universities. ⚠ Unverified by primary sources: according to compiled secondary material, around 2005 CityU is said to have offered provincial gaokao top scorers full scholarships totalling approximately HK$440,000 over four years, while the Chinese University of Hong Kong is said to have offered scholarships of approximately HK$500,000 over four years to candidates ranked in the national top 100 during the same period — the two figures are comparable, reflecting the intensity of competition for top candidates among the eight universities. These comparative figures have not been cross-confirmed by direct, contemporaneous official announcements from either institution and appear only in compiled secondary accounts; this article includes them as background reference only, not as precise historical fact.

By the 2026 intake, according to compiled public admission material from various institutions^※, scholarship systems for mainland undergraduates across Hong Kong's eight public institutions have generally become "tiered and substantial" — beyond CityU-style tiered full/half tuition waivers based on gaokao ranking, some institutions also offer higher-tier dedicated awards such as "full entrance scholarships" (covering tuition plus a living allowance of up to approximately HK$175,000 per year). This suggests that gaokao-ranking-tiered scholarships of the "top-scorer scholarship" type have become standard practice across the sector for Hong Kong's funded universities competing for top mainland candidates, with CityU being one participant in this institutional ecosystem rather than its originator.

# One exception: higher thresholds for mainland applicants to the Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine

Not all CityU programmes evaluate mainland applicants under the three scholarship tiers described above on equal terms. CityU's flagship Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM) programme — the only one of its kind in Hong Kong, run in partnership with Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine — sets stricter additional conditions for mainland applicants than most other programmes. According to publicly available admission material^※, mainland gaokao candidates applying to the law and veterinary medicine programmes must score above 135 (out of 150) in English, and their actual gaokao score (excluding any policy-based bonus points) must reach the first-tier (yiben) undergraduate admission cut-off score of their home province. This additional threshold is one of the few cases of "programme-specific loading" within CityU's mainland admission system, reflecting the veterinary programme's international accreditation requirements (dual RCVS/AVBC accreditation) and its clinical training's heavy reliance on English-medium instruction, both of which raise the language-proficiency bar above that for general arts, science and business programmes.

# The 2026 turning point: from "early-batch national admission" to "independent admission"

CityU's mainland undergraduate admission underwent an institutional adjustment for the 2026 intake^※: before 2026, CityU admitted mainland students through the early batch of the national unified gaokao, with places counted within the national admission plan, requiring candidates to choose between mainland institutions and CityU when submitting their application; from 2026, CityU has moved to an "independent admission" model, explicitly not participating in the "national early-batch admission" and with places not counted against the national admission quota^※ — eligible candidates may submit an application to CityU separately, alongside their normal mainland institution applications, with the two not in conflict.

The final cohort's scale before the reform is a useful reference point: according to compiled education-sector information, CityU admitted approximately 300 mainland Chinese students through the "national unified admission" track in the 2025/26 intake^※. Under the new policy, applicants must reach their home province's "yiben line" / special-category admission control score threshold on actual gaokao results (excluding bonus points), score 110 or above in English, and be admitted on merit with no upper or lower quota set per province or municipality^※ — "no upper or lower quota" means CityU is no longer bound by nationally allocated admission quotas as it was under the unified-admission system, and in principle admission scale could vary with applicant quality.

This adjustment shifts CityU's mainland admission from a zero-sum competition — "competing with top mainland institutions for a single application slot" — to an incremental model — "an additional option that does not affect one's mainland application." For CityU, this could in principle expand its pool of potential applicants; for candidates, it lowers the decision cost of "betting on CityU meaning giving up a place at a top mainland institution." Whether the roughly 300-student annual scale will grow noticeably as a result, or whether the composition of the applicant pool will change, will only become clear over the next few admission cycles; this article makes no prediction on that point.

# The general "Gangpiao" experience in Hong Kong: where it differs from CityU-specific admission data

The above traces the evolution of CityU's own admission system. When the lens widens to the broader Hong Kong phenomenon of "mainland students coming to Hong Kong to study and live," a careful distinction must be drawn between general research on the "Gangpiao" (mainlanders in Hong Kong) population as a whole, and data specific to CityU — this is a standing editorial principle of this site (see the article "Language Environment and the 'Mainlandisation' Debate").

The "Gangpiao" research report published by the Hong Kong Ideas Centre in November 2013^※ is among the earlier systematic surveys in this area — the study conducted face-to-face questionnaire interviews with 500 mainland-origin individuals who had been in Hong Kong for under 7 years (split roughly evenly between students and working professionals), together with in-depth interviews with 30 of them^※. Wen Wei Po reported the core figures from this survey^※:

⚠ Not found: Among publicly available sources, this compilation could not locate an independent survey or academic study specifically sampling CityU mainland undergraduates — the Ideas Centre data above reflects the general experience of the territory-wide "Gangpiao" population (including working professionals), and cannot be directly equated with the specific experience of mainland undergraduates enrolled at CityU. Housing difficulties (particularly hostel-place allocation, see Module 21), language adjustment, and social integration among CityU mainland students are not extrapolated or speculated upon in this article absent CityU-specific sourcing.

# A twenty-seven-year throughline: from "sponsoring individual students" to "institutionalised competitive bidding for candidates"

Viewed as a single timeline from 1998 to 2026, a clear throughline emerges: Hong Kong universities' approach to mainland candidates has evolved from early reliance on charitable sponsorship (the Jockey Club) of individual students, to institutionalised "bidding for candidates" among universities — scholarship thresholds are now precise to "top 0.1% of the province," and the admission model has shifted from "choose between CityU and a mainland application" to "independent admission, no conflict." Each step has reduced the opportunity cost, for top mainland candidates, of choosing Hong Kong.

This throughline also explains why the "top-scorer scholarship" has become a highly recognisable term among mainland candidates and their families — it is not a one-off publicity device, but part of an admissions infrastructure that CityU and the other seven funded universities have continuously invested in and iterated on over more than two decades. It is one of two sides of the same broader process that also includes Hong Kong's overall policy of raising the non-local student quota to 50% (see the article "Language Environment and the 'Mainlandisation' Debate") — one being the policy-level question of "tightening or loosening the entry gate," the other the operational-level question of "on what terms to recruit the strongest mainland candidates."

::: Limited sourcing This article's account of the early 1998–2003 period draws mainly on a compiled Wikipedia entry (not directly cross-checked against Hong Kong Jockey Club or government primary archival material); some early figures (such as the specific institutional distribution of the 80 mainland students) have not been found broken down in further primary detail. CityU's own 2005–2006 admission figures, by contrast, are documented in Sunshine College Admissions / CHSI records and carry higher reliability. A systematic, year-by-year statistical series of CityU's mainland undergraduate enrolment and growth could not be found in public sources; this article has not attempted to force such a series together, and presents only the timeline of institutional change and the known data points. The "Gangpiao" experience data is strictly confined to territory-wide samples and is not carried over into CityU-specific conclusions. This article's effective word count falls below the target floor for the "institutional documentation" category — since no complete, officially published year-by-year time series of CityU's mainland admission numbers or enrolled totals could be found, the confirmed data points located through public search (1998/1999/2003/2005/2006/2025/2026) have been included as fully as possible with their sourcing basis noted; the article presents "known data points plus gaps" as they stand, rather than padding with unrelated content. :::