Cabinet Work and Cabinet Elections: The "Confluence" Cabinet from Fourteen to One and the Empty-Cabinet Crisis

In the early morning of 7 February 2022, the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) Students' Union president was woken by a phone call: the University had, without warning, written to the Union demanding that its office be vacated within a week. A year later, of the original fourteen-member team, only the president remained, holding on under the banner of a "Provisional Executive Committee". He described the departure of his former cabinet colleagues not as a loss but as a relief — "some want to study, some want to work". Behind this understated remark lies a problem that has long dogged student self-governance at Hong Kong universities yet is rarely discussed openly: getting elected is not the hard part — surviving to the end of your term is itself an attrition war.

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# I. What "going on cabinet" means: a year of collective labour

In the vocabulary of Hong Kong's tertiary institutions, 「上莊」 (literally "going on the cabinet", i.e. joining an executive committee) refers to a team of students taking charge of a student organisation — the Students' Union executive committee, a departmental society, a hall association, or an affiliated club — for one year, overseeing activities, finances, publicity, recruitment, external liaison and handover. CityU's executive committee operates on exactly this model — each term's committee runs as a single "cabinet" (内阁), and once elected, its members serve together for one year before handing over to the next term. The broader structure and electoral system are covered in the companion article 〈Structure and Elections〉.

The appeal of this model is that it offers a training ground rarely available at university — an approximation of running a real organisation. Students must handle external communications, event approvals, financial statements, media relations and a host of other matters with limited budgets and limited manpower; such experience often becomes a highlight on a CV. But the cost is just as concrete: it devours spare time, demands endless meetings, forces you to rub along with teammates, and leaves almost no escape route when things go wrong. What has happened at CityU in recent years offers a remarkably complete picture of how this model can come apart under extreme pressure.

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# II. The "Confluence" cabinet: from taking office to mere survival

According to the in-depth report by The Collective^※, on the morning of 7 February 2022, Lau Chun-kit (Lau Chun-kit; nicknamed "楼仔" Lou Zai within student circles), then president of the CityU Students' Union, learned from a classmate's phone call that the University had written to the Union without any prior notice, announcing it was reclaiming the Union's office on the sixth floor of the campus composite building and demanding that it be vacated within one week. Lou Zai had taken office that year as part of a cabinet; that term's executive committee comprised 14 officers. According to the compilation on Wikipedia^※, this term (the 37th, 2022) went by the cabinet codename 「聚流」 ("Confluence").

Lou Zai told The Collective^※ of his state of mind at the time: 「我完全想像不到，没有会室如何找到生存空间。」 ("I simply could not imagine how we were to find a way to survive without an office.") Within the space of a single week, Union members had to simultaneously locate and move premises, contact more than thirty affiliated clubs, deal with the media, and negotiate with the University — high-intensity work that was meant to be spread across a full year's term, compressed into seven days.

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# III. Two relocations: from a Fo Tan "warehouse" to self-reliance in Sham Shui Po

According to the same report, the "Confluence" cabinet went through two moves:

Leg one (February–August 2022): the Fo Tan industrial area. Lou Zai described the temporary lodgings as stuffy and cramped, like a warehouse. Three MTR stops from the Kowloon Tong campus, a round trip took about an hour — a distance that effectively killed off the students who might previously have "dropped by for a chat" on a whim. The office went from being somewhere on campus, always within reach, to a place you had to make a special trip to reach — a direct blow to the Union's visibility and its daily footfall.

Leg two (from February 2023): 124–126 Castle Peak Road, Sham Shui Po. Here the Union rented the fifth and sixth floors combined, roughly 2,000 square feet in total. The sixth floor became a student services area (self-study, merchandise sales, enquiries), while the fifth floor was rented out to affiliated clubs for events — a music society, for instance, once held a competition there that drew more than a hundred participants.

Between the two moves, the cabinet's manpower was bleeding away. According to reports, the "Confluence" cabinet originally had 14 officers; by 2023 only Lou Zai remained, keeping Union affairs running as a member of a "Provisional Executive Committee". By then Lou Zai was in his third year, with more than 800 cumulative days of involvement in student organisations — a figure that itself suggests the few who make it to the end tend to be those who treated "going on cabinet" as a long-term commitment rather than a one-year assignment.

As for why the other 13 officers left, Lou Zai's account was that 「前莊員找到自己的目標，有人想讀書、有人想工作」 ("the former cabinet members found their own goals — some want to study, some want to work"), and he said he felt relieved rather than disappointed. This self-narrative is worth recording, but some caveat is in order — the report does not document each of the 13's individual whereabouts or the timing of their departures, nor whether these were directly tied to the office crisis or financial pressures; existing public sources do not allow verification case by case. This article presents the outcome — a one-person provisional committee — faithfully, without speculating about the proportions of underlying causes.

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# IV. Financial self-sufficiency: scrambling to survive a halved membership income

The other pressure bearing down on the "Confluence" cabinet and its successors was financial. According to reports, from 2022 the University refused to continue collecting Union membership fees on its behalf (see the full account in 〈Fees, Finances and the Black Box: Disputes over Accounts〉), with the result that both membership numbers and fee income were halved (cut in half).

To close the gap, the Union pursued two self-rescue paths:

• Tying membership to affiliated clubs: making Union membership a precondition for joining any affiliated club, thereby broadening the membership base — described in the report as killing two birds with one stone;
• Venue rental and merchandise sales: renting out the fifth floor to clubs for events, and selling "welfare goods" on the sixth floor (e.g. stationery at HK$4 for members, HK$6 for non-members), along with Union-designed hoodies.

All of these moves pointed to a single goal — self-sufficiency, i.e. cutting loose entirely from the University's fee-collection mechanism and sustaining the Union's operations in the form of an external commercial company. That transformation had moved beyond the question of whether one term's cabinet could hand over smoothly; it became a question of whether the Union could continue to exist as an organisation outside the campus establishment at all.

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# V. How the O-Camp financial black hole sank a cabinet's morale: the 2017 precedent

The "Confluence" cabinet's plight was extreme, but CityU student cabinets losing morale under financial pressure is no isolated case. According to a December 2017 report by on.cc^※, the CityU Students' Union's summer orientation camp (O-Camp) at Pak Tam Chung in 2017 ended up with a loss of HK$304,000 (income of HK$284,000 against expenditure of HK$588,000).

The then-president, Chan Ngok-lam^※, explained the causes to the media: nearly half of the "group dads and group mums" (「組爸組媽」 — the senior students leading groups of freshers) had not paid their fees of around HK$500; large numbers of "old ghosts" (「老鬼」 — graduated or departed senior students) had entered the camp unapproved, pushing numbers over the campsite's limit and incurring fines; some activities ran over time, attracting additional penalties; and hiring buses to and from the site cost HK$33,000. Expenditure items questioned by students included 18 water buckets at a total of HK$4,050 (HK$225 apiece) and a water-fight venue fee of HK$14,000 at the Pak Shek barbecue site — figures students felt were on the high side, though no independent verification of the unit prices' reasonableness by the University or a third-party auditor appears in the reporting.

「填氹」 — literally "filling the pit", Cantonese slang for covering a financial hole — was a word that recurred throughout the affair. Chan Ngok-lam was reported as saying he would boost the tuck shop's turnover to "increase income and cut expenditure", and would review financial management methods; he stressed that the Union had pursued the debtors but without success.

This loss came five years before the "Confluence" crisis, but the two events share a structural root: the financial scale of O-Camps and cabinet affairs far exceeds what one term of students, managing in their spare time and with no professional background, can normally be expected to handle safely — involving venue contracts, insurance, head-count control, coach chartering, catering procurement and other professional matters. When any one link spirals out of control (overspending, overcapacity, unpaid fees), the responsibility ultimately lands on that term's president alone, who must answer to the entire membership and to the University.

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# VI. A PR disaster within one term: the 2018 editorial board's "Shitty" blunder

Cabinet pressure comes not only from finances and manpower but also from the backlash of a single misjudgment — the 2018 editorial board's "freshman special issue" controversy is a textbook case of "a decision inside the cabinet → public explosion → emergency damage control" in CityU's student self-governance history.

According to Oriental Daily^※ and on.cc^※, the CityU Students' Union Editorial Board's August 2018 freshman special issue featured, on its cover, a reworking of the University's English name, changing "City" to "Shitty", with the Chinese full name correspondingly rendered as 「又一城市大學」 ("Another Shitty University"). Both were long-circulating, jocular jibes at the University's name. When the University noticed, it issued a warning to the Editorial Board on 9 August, saying the use of the University emblem could cause "confusion", and requiring the board to cover the cover and apologise. The board subsequently issued an apology statement and stopped distributing that issue, while acknowledging further "human errors and technical problems" in the freshman pages.

The public reaction was fierce. Some netizens criticised the editors responsible for the special issue for "not respecting the university they attend", arguing that a freshman special issue ought to preserve newcomers' aspirations for the University rather than lead with a joke; others pointed out that the board's English-language apology itself contained grammatical errors, further amplifying the embarrassment.

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# VII. "Broken cabinets": a systemic pressure across the university sector, and CityU is no exception

According to a 2021 report by HK01^※, owing to the pandemic and 「斷莊」 ("broken cabinets"), none of the eight UGC-funded universities held a Students' Union orientation camp that year. 「斷莊」 refers to a term in which a student organisation fails to form a new cabinet because no one runs, or the running cabinet fails to meet the constitutional threshold — leaving the organisation in a power vacuum or dependent on temporary arrangements. This is not unique to CityU but a structural pressure shared across Hong Kong's tertiary sector: as "going on cabinet" has come to be widely seen as time-consuming, cliquish and favour-driven, the number of students willing to devote a full year of spare time has been shrinking year by year.

The CityU Students' Union has in recent years repeatedly operated under the title of a "Provisional Executive Committee" — materials from the Union's orientation platform show it publishing information in the name of the "41st Provisional Executive Committee" — a phenomenon highly consistent with 「斷莊」: it is not that no students care about Union affairs, but that a full constitutional cabinet cannot be assembled, so the Union limps along in "provisional" form, waiting for the next proper election.

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# VIII. The other side of "going on cabinet": the shared folklore of Hong Kong's cabinet wars

Place CityU's case back in the wider coordinates of Hong Kong's tertiary sector, and the drama that cabinet pressure produces is hardly CityU's alone. According to HK01's compilation of legendary cabinet episodes over the years^※, the "dem beat" culture (the chanting-and-clapping publicity rituals of cabinet campaigns) has seen candidates lose their composure at campaign events and overturn tables (「反枱」) in front of everyone — episodes passed down as "classic stories" in student legend. The veracity and details of such anecdotes are hard to verify case by case; this article does not treat them as CityU-specific historical record, but merely as background reference for the overall atmosphere of "going on cabinet" campaign culture — high pressure, high emotional investment, tribal competition.

What really distinguishes the CityU cases from general folklore is that every incident covered in this article carries verifiable dates, locations, amounts or official responses: the "Confluence" cabinet's slide from 14 members to one is supported by the named president's own account to The Collective; the 2017 O-Camp loss of HK$304,000 comes with specific income and expenditure figures; the 2018 Editorial Board affair is evidenced by the University's warning and the board's apology. This distinction between "verifiable" and "hearsay" is precisely the credibility-grading principle this site applies to cabinet disputes — there are plenty of great stories, but only those that left traces get written into the official history.

# IX. After the empty cabinet: who hands over, and what is handed over

What the "Confluence" cabinet ultimately left behind may be worth recording more than the crisis itself: even when he was the only one left, Lou Zai chose to stay on as a member of the "Provisional Executive Committee" rather than let the Union slip into a complete power vacuum. This stance of "staying to the very end" is by no means rare in Hong Kong's student self-governance — in every 「斷莊」 year, there are individual students willing to hold the most basic organisational continuity together in a "provisional" capacity, even if it means shouldering alone the workload meant for a dozen-plus people.

For those who come after, the practical question this history leaves is: can a "Provisional Executive Committee" of one person fully hand over the constitution, the seal, the bank accounts, the records of past activities and the network of contacts to the next formal cabinet? Existing public sources contain no systematic record of such handover details. This article accordingly marks the boundary of the available material: how a one-person provisional committee transitions (smoothly or otherwise) back to a formal election is an open, unresolved question in the study of CityU student power — one worth following up.

::: Note on source limitations This article is compiled primarily from reports by The Collective, HK01, on.cc and other media. The specific statements attributed to the two presidents, Lou Zai and Chan Ngok-lam, come via media transcription; existing public sources lack internal Union meeting records to corroborate some details (such as the specific timing of the 13 officers' departures and their individual reasons). Names follow the named reporting in public coverage; other current and former students are referred to in general terms. :::

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