The Choice Facing Affiliated Clubs: A Fork in the Road at CityU's 2022 Freshmen Registration Day and Club-Forming Culture in an Age of Broken Lineages

August 2022, CityU Freshmen Registration Day. On this day in previous years, the booths of over thirty affiliated clubs would have been crammed with committee members recruiting new blood and fresh-faced newcomers. This year, some of those booths had changed hands — they no longer flew the student union flag but had reappeared under a new identity as "Student Development Services (SDS) Registered Societies." The student union had been compelled to move off campus six months earlier (for details, see the article on Financial Disputes and the Opaque Box of Student Union Fees and Accounts). For the first time, the grassroots organisations that had always been an organic part of the "student union system" were faced with a stark, practical choice: stay, or switch over?

# 1. The Choice: Remain with the Student Union or Switch Allegiance to SDS

According to an in-depth report by an independent media outlet^※, following the CityU Student Union's removal from campus in 2022, the university administration adopted different policies on venue allocation for clubs that remained under the student union's umbrella and those that re-registered with the Student Development Services (SDS). Affiliated clubs still within the student union system could no longer use campus venues as a matter of course, as they had in the past. By contrast, groups that switched to SDS could, on that basis, reapply to share campus activity rooms and facility resources.

By the time of that year's Freshmen Registration Day, it was reported that at least three original student union affiliated clubs had registered to switch to SDS and were allocated booths. The remaining clubs still within the student union system could only use public spaces designated by the university for self-study, putting up promotional banners to recruit new members — a stark contrast to the formal booth allocations granted to those that switched allegiance.

According to reports, the university's public explanation was that it had completed a comprehensive review and inspection of the allocation of existing student activity rooms and facilities. The university was carrying out large-scale improvement works, and once completed, "eligible" student organisations would have the opportunity to apply for and share campus spaces.

CityU's affiliated clubs cover a broad spectrum. According to the student union's orientation platform, the club directory includes over thirty directions: astronomy, dance, drama, film, anime and doujin culture, debating, investment and finance, social services, religious groups, and more. The common thread among these clubs is their modest size and dependence on fixed venues for regular activities (rehearsal rooms, screening rooms, gathering spaces). The variable of venue access therefore had a far more direct impact on their operations than on the central organs of the Executive Committee, which could maintain basic functions from a commercial space in Sham Shui Po (for details, see the article on Executive Committee Affairs: Cabinet Elections and the Controversy of Vacant Posts). But for a dance or drama club needing a fixed rehearsal studio, the loss of a campus venue meant their entire mode of activity had to be redesigned almost from scratch.

# 2. The Reason to Stay: The Practical Value of Autonomy and "Freedom of Voice"

For the majority of affiliated clubs that chose to remain under the student union's name, the core consideration presented in reports was the value of "independence from the university" itself. An organisation not subject to direct registration and management by the university theoretically possesses an autonomous space for planning activities, issuing public statements, and even discussing specific campus issues — a space unavailable to university-registered societies. This resonates strongly with the concepts of "organisational capacity" and "bargaining power" discussed under the "five categories of student power" in this module's article on Structure and Elections. By choosing to remain in the student union system, these clubs were, in a sense, trading the tangible loss of venue resources for the preservation of organisational autonomy.

This autonomy, however, came at a price. After 2022, the student union transitioned to operating as an off-campus company, and its financial revenue was halved (for details, see the article on Financial Disputes and the Opaque Box of Student Union Fees and Accounts). This meant the resource support that clubs staying under the union's name could receive from the "parent body" — such as venue sub-letting or activity funding coordination — was itself shrinking simultaneously. When clubs made the choice to "stay," they were facing a student union system contending with both tightening finances and venue access. This choice was not "comfort zone versus adventure," but something closer to "a choice between two difficult paths."

# 3. What Does "Sheung Jong" (Forming a Committee) Actually Train? A Dual Perspective from the Clubs

The committee work of an affiliated club and that of an Executive Committee cabinet (detailed in the article on Executive Committee Affairs: Cabinet Elections and the Controversy of Vacant Posts) are highly similar in their training value. With a limited budget and limited hands, a cohort of students must simultaneously handle multi-threaded tasks like member recruitment campaigns, event planning, financial bookkeeping, venue applications, and external liaison. For participants, this is one of the few practical opportunities at university level that approximates the operation of a real organisation. Especially for non-residential students wishing to meet people across different disciplines, clubs are often their first point of contact with the inner workings of "running an organisation" (for details, see the positioning of affiliated clubs in Section 2 of the article on Structure and Elections).

But the other side of club committee work is equally real: small scale and scarce resources mean that if something goes wrong in any link of the chain — insufficient sign-ups, budget overruns, a venue suddenly withdrawn — there is virtually no buffer to absorb the shock, and the responsibility falls directly on the shoulders of that year's committee members. Unlike Executive Committee cabinets, which have checks and balances behind them like a Union Council or an Arbitration Committee (detailed in the article on Structure and Elections), club committees are usually a few students sorting things out amongst themselves, and they must shoulder any problems alone. This is why, as venue resources were being re-carved in 2022, the clubs' response appeared so remarkably plain: not launching an appeal or protest, but the tangible choice of "stay" or "switch over."

# 4. The Other Side of Committee-Building Pressure: "Broken Lineages" Across Hong Kong and Critiques of "Old Ghost Culture"

The choice facing affiliated clubs occurred against a larger backdrop: the recurring phenomenon of "broken lineages" (斷莊) in Hong Kong's tertiary education sector in recent years. This refers to a situation where no one runs for election, or the number of cabinets contesting falls below the statutory threshold, leading to a failed handover and a power vacuum within a student organisation. According to a 2021 HK01 report^※, due to the pandemic and "broken lineages," none of Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities had student union orientation camps that year. This was not an isolated phenomenon at a single institution but a structural predicament shared across Hong Kong's academic community.

Commentators and observers generally point to two major causes for "broken lineages." The first is a shifting political and administrative environment, which has caused the perceived real-world risks and responsibilities of forming a committee to escalate dramatically. The second is the long-standing "harsh traditions" and the "old ghost culture" (老鬼文化) inherent in the committee-forming culture itself — a situation where successive cohorts of retired committee members (colloquially known as "old ghosts") exert disproportionate influence over current office-bearers, forming a closed, hierarchical, favour-based circle that deters a new generation of students from running for office. This belongs to the same vein of phenomena as the campus anecdotes mentioned in Part 5, such as "hot-blooded dem beat committee-forming and table-flipping" (for details, see Section 8 of the article on Executive Committee Affairs: Cabinet Elections and the Controversy of Vacant Posts). Forming a committee is perceived by some students less as a simple pursuit of interest and more as a form of collective labour requiring one to "pay dues" and "read faces."

For CityU, affiliated clubs and departmental societies operate under this same logic of "Sheung Jong": each year, a new cohort of student committee members takes over operations. When facing real-world problems like recruitment difficulties, budget constraints, and cumbersome activity approval procedures, the question of "will there be a next cohort willing to take over?" is a sword hanging perpetually over every club's head.

# 5. Anecdotal Memories of Internal Friction: From the Mocked University Name to "Table-Flipping" Tales

Another category of controversy worth recording in the culture of affiliated clubs and departmental societies is the public furore triggered by "intra-committee decisions." The module article on Executive Committee Affairs: Cabinet Elections and the Controversy of Vacant Posts has already detailed the 2018 incident involving the Editorial Board's Orientation Special Issue that "mocked the university's name." Although this incident was triggered by a central organ of the student union (the Editorial Board), its nature is highly analogous to the committee culture of affiliated clubs and departmental societies: a small team staffed part-time by enrolled students makes a judgement call under limited time and approval resources, and if that judgement does not align with mainstream public expectations, the team must bear the ensuing public backlash alone.

As for the more theatrically circulated tales of "table-flipping at committee formation" and "shouting matches at consultation meetings," existing public sources are mostly general reports or word-of-mouth accounts spanning Hong Kong's universities, and do not constitute verifiable cases specific to CityU (see the credibility note in Section 8 of the article on Executive Committee Affairs: Cabinet Elections and the Controversy of Vacant Posts). This article adheres to the same principle: the friction and pressure that genuinely exist within the committee culture of affiliated clubs are real phenomena worth recording, but such recording should be anchored to "verifiable events at CityU itself." Generalized descriptions of the Hong Kong academic community should not be directly grafted onto CityU as specific, named case studies.

# 6. Departmental Societies: Another Layer of Organisations Facing the Same Pressure of Broken Lineages

Beyond affiliated clubs, departmental societies (Departmental Society) form another vast layer of grassroots organisations at CityU, equally affected by the committee-forming culture. According to public information from the student union, CityU's departmental societies span around twenty-some disciplines, including Accounting, Economics, Chinese, Communications/Creative Media, Engineering, Law, and Data Science. They are responsible for their department's freshmen orientation, academic lectures, tutoring and past paper sharing, social activities, and welfare benefits (see Section 7 of the article on Structure and Elections for a related overview). The difference between departmental societies and affiliated clubs lies in the fact that a departmental society's orientation camp (usually called an "O-Camp" or departmental orientation) is often the first concrete occasion where newcomers encounter the "Sheung Jong" culture. The 2018 accounting department "balloon-stuffed-in-chest" incident recorded in this module's article on Residence Associations and O-Camps was reportedly more likely organised by the departmental society or its orientation organising committee, rather than by a central student union organ or a residence association.

This means that within CityU's "non-collegiate" institutional structure (see Section 3 of the article on Structure and Elections), departmental societies shoulder a heavier orientation function than ordinary affiliated clubs. Consequently, they are more directly exposed to the risk of controversies like "inappropriate orientation camp content." Departmental societies face the same pressures of annual handover and recruitment difficulties. If a departmental society experiences a "broken lineage" one year, it's not just social activities that are affected; the most important channel of academic resource sharing in a new student's first year — such as past papers and tutoring arrangements — also collapses.

# 7. Conclusion: Affiliated Clubs are the Most Grassroots, and Most Vulnerable, Link in the Student Power Ecosystem

Viewed across the five articles in this module, affiliated clubs and departmental societies sit at the very grassroots of CityU's student power ecosystem. Unlike the Executive Committee or the Union Council, they are not directly embroiled in institutional disputes over seats on the University Council or financial audits (see the articles on Structure and Elections and Union Finances). Yet, with every tremor that shakes the student union system, they must face anew the concrete, practical questions of "to whom do we belong?", "which venues can we use?", and "who will take over next year?", right down to the level of booth allocations and committee manpower.

The choice presented at the 2022 Freshmen Registration Day serves, in a sense, as a mirror. It reflects not the political stance of one club "picking a side," but the precise way in which student self-governance resources — venues, funds, and manpower — are being re-carved within a landscape where two systems, the university's and the student union's, coexist and compete. This process of re-carving is ongoing. As of this writing (mid-2026), the latest data from public sources this article relies on remains anchored around the 2022–2023 period. Whether the configuration of club allegiance has undergone further changes since then cannot be determined from currently available public sources. This should be supplemented with updated information from official or student media publications in the future.

# 8. A Synthesis of Five Articles: A Downward Path from "Structure" to "Grassroots"

Reading the five articles of this module in sequence reveals a clear downward path. Structure and Elections starts from the top of the institutional design — the separation of five powers and seats on the University Council. Executive Committee Affairs: Cabinet Elections and the Controversy of Vacant Posts descends to how a single Executive Committee cabinet is actually formed and how it can unravel. Financial Disputes and the Opaque Box of Student Union Fees and Accounts uncovers how the actual hard cash needed to sustain this entire structure became problematic. Residence Associations and O-Camps pivots to the potential risks individual students might encounter at the scene of a specific activity. And this final article settles on the most grassroots, and most easily overlooked, stratum of the organisational ecosystem: the affiliated clubs and departmental societies. They neither directly hold seats on the University Council nor directly handle sixteen-year-long financial audits, and yet, with every tremor in the student union system, they are passively forced to re-decide the fundamental question: "To whom do we actually belong?"

The core issue revealed by this downward path can perhaps be distilled into a single sentence: Within CityU's student power ecosystem, the higher the tier of an organisation, the greater its bargaining chips and media visibility; the more grassroots the organisation, the more direct and severe the impact of systemic shocks it must absorb, often with very few channels for making its voice heard. Affiliated clubs and departmental societies have no monitoring platforms like the Editorial Board or City Broadcasting, nor the external representative qualifications of the Executive Committee. The choices available to them are often reduced to a plain binary: "stay" or "switch over." Understanding this might bring one closer to the true texture of how student self-governance operates than repeatedly asking the question, "Is CityU's student union strong or not?"

::: Data Limitations The specific figure of "at least three affiliated clubs switching to SDS" and related details in this article originate from a summary in a comprehensive report by an independent media outlet. No formal statistical announcements from the Student Union or SDS regarding the number of clubs that switched allegiance have been found in currently available public sources. The named discussions and decision-making processes of individual clubs have also not been disclosed. Adhering to BLP and credibility grading principles, this article makes no speculative additions regarding the specific names of clubs or the identities of office-bearers. :::