The Fate of Affiliated Societies: A Choice at the 2022 Registration Day and Cabinet Culture in the Age of Broken Cabinets

In August 2022, at CityU's freshman registration day. In previous years, this was a day when the booths of more than thirty affiliated societies should have been crowded with recruiting officers and new students; that year, some booths had changed hands—they no longer hung the students' union banner, but reappeared as "Student Development Services (SDS) registered groups." The students' union had already moved off campus six months earlier (see Union Fees, Finances, and the Black-Box Account Disputes), and the grassroots organisations that had once been a matter of course within the "students' union system" were, for the first time, presented with a real choice: stay, or switch?

# 1. A Choice: Stay with the Union, or Move to SDS

According to in-depth reporting by independent media^※, after the CityU students' union moved off campus in 2022, the University treated affiliates that remained under the union's umbrella differently from those that registered under the Student Development Services (SDS) when allocating space: societies still within the union system could no longer use campus venues as a matter of course, as they once had; groups that switched to SDS, by contrast, could reapply on that basis to share campus activity rooms and facilities.

By the registration day that year, it was reported that at least three societies formerly under the union had registered with SDS and been allocated booths; the rest, which stayed with the union, could only use the common spaces the University had set aside for student self-study to put up recruitment banners—a marked contrast with the formal booth allocations available to those who had switched.

According to the same reports, the University's public explanation was that it had completed a comprehensive review and inspection of existing student activity rooms and facility allocation, and was in the midst of a large-scale improvement programme; once complete, it would offer "eligible" student organisations the opportunity to apply for and share campus space.

CityU's affiliated societies cover a wide range of fields—according to the union's public directory on its orientation platform, the societies span more than thirty directions, including astronomy, dance, drama, film, anime and doujin, debate, investment and finance, social service, and religious groups. These societies share a common feature: they are small in scale and depend on fixed venues for regular activities (rehearsal rooms, screening rooms, gathering spaces). The venue variable therefore affects their operations far more directly than it does the union's central organs—the Executive Committee can sustain basic business from commercial premises in Sham Shui Po (see Cabinet Elections and the Vacancy Crisis), but a dance or drama society requiring a fixed rehearsal room, once deprived of campus venues, would almost have to redesign its entire mode of activity.

# 2. Reasons for Staying: The Practical Value of Autonomy and "Freedom of Speech"

For the majority of societies that chose to remain with the union, the central consideration, as the reports present it, was the value of the attribute "independent of the University" itself—an organisation not directly registered and managed by the University theoretically enjoys an autonomy that University-registered groups lack, in organising activity content, taking public positions, and even discussing specific campus issues. This strongly echoes the "organisational capacity" and "bargaining capacity" discussed in the module's Structure and Elections article under the "five kinds of student power": by choosing to stay within the union system, societies were, in a sense, trading a real loss in venue resources for the preservation of organisational autonomy.

But this autonomy does not come without cost. After 2022, the students' union itself shifted to operating as an off-campus company, and its financial income was halved (see the Union Fees, Finances, and the Black-Box Account Disputes article). This means that the resource support societies under the union could draw from the "parent body" (such as venue subletting and activity funding coordination) was itself shrinking in tandem. When societies chose to "stay," they were facing a union system in which both finances and venues were tightening—this was not a choice between "comfort zone vs. risk," but closer to "two paths, neither easy—pick one."

# 3. What "Taking Up a Cabinet" Actually Trains: The Two Sides from a Society Perspective

Society cabinets and Executive Committee cabinets (see the Cabinet Elections and the Vacancy Crisis article) are highly similar in training value: one cohort of students, with a limited budget and limited manpower, must simultaneously handle recruitment and publicity, event planning, financial bookkeeping, venue applications, external liaison, and more. For participants, this is one of the few practical opportunities at university that approximates the operation of a real organisation—especially for students who do not live in halls and want to meet people across disciplines, societies are often their first entry point into "how organisations run" (see the positioning of societies in section 2 of the Structure and Elections article).

But the flip side of society cabinet work is equally real: small scale and few resources mean that if any single step goes wrong (insufficient sign-ups, event overspending, venues pulled at short notice), there is almost no buffer to absorb the shock—the responsibility falls directly on that year's officers. Compared to the Executive Committee cabinet, which has checks and balances behind it such as the Council and the Arbitration Committee (see the Structure and Elections article), society cabinet work is usually a few students making decisions among themselves, and when problems arise, they carry them alone. This is also why, when venue resources were re-sliced in 2022, the societies' response appeared strikingly plain—not appeals or protests, but the pragmatic choice to "stay" or "switch."

# 4. The Other Side of Cabinet Pressure: Territory-wide "Broken Cabinets" and Criticism of the "Old Ghost Culture"

The choices facing societies unfolded against a larger backdrop: the recurring phenomenon of "broken cabinets" (斷莊) in Hong Kong tertiary education in recent years—when a cohort of a student organisation fails to transition because no one stands for election or the incoming cabinet falls short of the legal quorum, leaving a power vacuum. According to the Hong Kong 01's 2021 report^※, due to the pandemic and "broken cabinets," none of Hong Kong's eight universities held a students' union orientation camp that year—this was not a problem unique to any single institution, but a structural predicament shared by the entire sector.

Commentators and public discourse generally attribute "broken cabinets" to two causes: first, changes in the political and administrative environment, which have made the practical risks and responsibilities of taking up a cabinet seem "to rise as the tide rises" (水漲船高); second, the long-standing "harsh traditions" and "old ghost culture" (老鬼文化) within cabinet culture itself—whereby former officers (colloquially known as "old ghosts") exert excessive influence over incumbent cabinet members, forming a closed, hierarchical circle based on seniority and personal connections, which deters a new generation of students from standing. This belongs to the same thread as the folk anecdotes of "passionate dem beat cabinets flipping the table" mentioned in the fifth article (see section 8 of the Cabinet Elections and the Vacancy Crisis article)—taking up a cabinet is seen by some students as a form of group labour requiring "enduring seniority" and "reading the room," rather than simply pursuing an interest.

For CityU, affiliated societies and departmental societies operate under the same "cabinet" logic: each year a cohort of student officers takes over, and when faced with the practical problems of recruitment difficulties, tight funding, and cumbersome activity approvals, "will there be a next cohort willing to take over?" is a question that hangs over every society.

# 5. Folk Memories of Internal Friction: From Parodying the University Name to "Table-Flipping" Anecdotes

Another category of controversy worth recording in society and departmental society culture is the public fallout from "cabinet decisions"—the module's Cabinet Elections and the Vacancy Crisis article has already detailed the 2018 incident in which the editorial board's Orientation Special Issue "parodied the university name." Although that incident was triggered by the union's central organ (the editorial board), its nature is highly similar to society and departmental society cabinet culture: a small team of part-time students making a judgment under limited time and approval resources, and when that judgment clashes with mainstream expectations, the team bears the resulting public backlash alone.

As for the more dramatic folk anecdotes of "cabinets flipping the table" and "shouting matches at consultation meetings," the available public sources are largely generalised accounts covering Hong Kong universities as a whole, or word of mouth—not verifiable cases specific to CityU (see the credibility note in section 8 of the Cabinet Elections and the Vacancy Crisis article). This article follows the same principle: the friction and pressure that genuinely exist in society cabinet culture are real and worth recording, but the record should be based on "events verifiable at CityU itself," without grafting folk generalisations about the entire Hong Kong tertiary sector onto CityU as named cases.

# 6. Departmental Societies: Another Layer of Grassroots Organisations Facing Broken Cabinets

Beyond affiliated societies, departmental societies are another layer of large-scale grassroots organisations at CityU equally subject to cabinet culture—according to the union's public materials, CityU departmental societies cover roughly twenty-odd disciplines including accounting, economics, Chinese, communication/creative media, engineering, law, and data science, responsible for departmental orientation, academic talks, tutoring and past-paper sharing, and social welfare (see the relevant compilation in section 7 of the Structure and Elections article). Departmental societies differ from affiliated societies in one key respect: their orientation camps (usually called "O-Camp" or departmental orientation) are often the first concrete setting in which new students encounter "cabinet culture"—the 2018 accounting department "balloon-stuffing" controversy recorded in the module's Hall Associations and O-Camp article was, according to reports, likely organised by the departmental society or its orientation organising committee, rather than the union's central organs or hall associations.

This means that, in CityU's structure without a collegiate system (see section 3 of the Structure and Elections article), departmental societies bear a heavier orientation function than ordinary affiliated societies, and are therefore more directly exposed to the risk of controversies such as "inappropriate content at orientation camps." Departmental societies also face the same annual pressure of handover and recruitment difficulties—if a departmental society "breaks" one year, what is affected is not just social activities, but also the most important channel for first-year students to access academic resources (such as past papers and tutoring arrangements).

# 7. Summary: Affiliated Societies Are the Most Grassroots—and Most Fragile—Link in the Student Power Ecosystem

Reading the module's five articles together, affiliated and departmental societies sit at the very grassroots of CityU's student power ecosystem—they do not directly embroil themselves in institutional disputes over Council seats or financial audits the way the Executive Committee and the Council do (see the Structure and Elections and Union Fees articles), yet with every upheaval in the union system, they must face anew the practical questions of "who do we belong to," "what venue do we use," and "who will take over"—down to the level of booth allocations and officer manpower.

The choice posed at the 2022 registration day was, in a sense, a mirror: what it reflected was not the political stance of any particular society "siding" with one party, but how student self-governance resources (venues, funding, manpower) are concretely re-sliced when the University and the union systems exist simultaneously and compete with each other. This slicing process is still ongoing—the public materials on which this article draws (as of mid-2026) stop at around 2022–2023; whether the affiliation landscape has shifted further since then, existing public sources have not provided updated data, and this should be supplemented later according to official or student media updates.

# 8. The Five Articles in Overview: A Descending Path from "Structure" to "Grassroots"

Reading the module's five articles in sequence reveals a clear descending path: Structure and Elections begins with the separation of five powers and Council seats at the institutional apex; Cabinet Elections and the Vacancy Crisis moves down to how one cabinet is formed and how it drains away; Union Fees, Finances, and the Black-Box Account Disputes exposes how the real money needed to keep the machinery running went wrong; Hall Associations and O-Camp turns to the risks individual students may encounter at specific activities; and this article, as the capstone, lands on the most grassroots, most easily overlooked link in the organisational ecosystem—affiliated and departmental societies. They neither directly hold Council seats nor directly handle sixteen years of account audits, yet in every upheaval of the union system, they are passively forced to re-decide "who we belong to."

The core question this descending path reveals can perhaps be summed up in one sentence: in CityU's student power ecosystem, the higher the level of the institution, the greater its bargaining chips and media exposure; the more grassroots the organisation, the more directly it absorbs the shock of institutional upheaval—and the fewer channels it has to speak out. Affiliated and departmental societies have no oversight platforms like the editorial board or City Broadcasting, and no external representative status like the Executive Committee. The choices available to them are often just plain binary decisions like "stay" or "switch." Understanding this may bring one closer to the actual texture of student self-governance than asking "is the CityU students' union strong or not."

:::source-limitations The specific figure of "at least three societies switching to SDS" and related details in this article come from a single comprehensive report by independent media; existing public sources show no formal statistical announcement from the union or SDS on the number of societies that switched; the named discussions and decision processes of individual societies have also not been disclosed. In accordance with the BLP and credibility-grading principles, this article makes no speculative additions regarding the names of specific societies or the identities of those responsible. :::