Society Work and Cabinet Elections: The 'Juli' Cabinet from 14 Members down to One and the Crisis of 'Liuzhuang

In late February 2022, the newly elected Cabinet of the City University of Hong Kong Students' Union, named "Juli" (聚流), had barely been in office a month when it received a letter from the university: vacate the union room within a week. Over a year later, of the original 14-member team, only the president remained, acting as the "Provisional Executive Committee". He described the departure of his former cabinet members not with a sense of loss but with relief — "some wanted to study, others wanted to work". Behind this understated remark lies a longstanding problem of Hong Kong student self-governance, rarely discussed in detail: being elected to a student society cabinet (a 'zong1') is not the end of the story; whether it can hold on until the handover is itself a war of attrition.

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# 1. What 'Going on the Society' (上莊) Means: A Year of Collective Labour

In the context of Hong Kong's tertiary institutions, sang1 zong1 (上莊, literally "going on the society") refers to a cohort of students taking over a student organisation — such as the students' union executive committee, departmental society, hall residents' association, or an affiliated club — for one year, managing activities, finances, publicity, recruitment, external liaison, and handover. At CityU, the executive committee operates on this model: each term's officers run for election as a whole slate called a "cabinet" (內閣), and, upon election, they collectively "go on the society" for a year, then hand over to the next cabinet at the end of their term.

The attraction of this model is that it offers a rare, near-real-world organisational training ground during university: with limited budgets and manpower, students must handle external communications, event approval, financial reports, media relations — a whole suite of tasks that often become highlights on a CV. But its costs are equally concrete: it consumes large amounts of free time, entails frequent meetings, demands that team-mates gel together, and leaves almost no fallback when crises hit. What has happened at CityU in recent years illustrates, with stark completeness, how this model can unravel under extreme pressure.

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# 2. The 'Juli' Cabinet: From Swearing-in to 'Survival Mode' in a Month

According to an in-depth report by The Collective^※, the CityU Students' Union had just completed its transition in late February 2022. The new executive cabinet "Juli" had barely settled in when, on 7 February 2022, it received a formal letter from the university's Student Development Office, announcing the repossession of the union room, then located on the sixth floor of the Academic Complex. The letter demanded that "Juli" complete the move within one week.

Then-president Lau Chun-kit (劉浚傑, nicknamed 'Lau Jai' 樓仔)^※ recalled his feelings at the time: "I could not imagine how we would find space to survive without a union room." Within a single week, the "Juli" cabinet had to simultaneously pack and move all of the union's belongings, coordinate with more than thirty affiliated clubs, and manage media communications — a high-intensity workload originally meant to be spread across a full year's term, compressed into seven days.

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# 3. Two Moves: From a Fo Tan 'Warehouse' to a Sham Shui Po 'Self-established' Base

According to the same report, the "Juli" cabinet subsequently underwent two relocations:

First move (February–August 2022): Fo Tan industrial area. Lau Jai described this temporary foothold as "damp and cramped like a warehouse" ("罨耷" in Cantonese), three MTR stations from the Kowloon Tong campus, about an hour's round trip — a distance sufficient to all but eliminate the flow of students who might otherwise "drop by and sit a while". Moving the union room from "within arm's reach on campus" to "a place you have to make a special trip to" directly gutted the union's visibility and everyday footfall.

Second move (from February 2023): 124–126 Castle Peak Road, Sham Shui Po. There the union rented around 2,000 square feet spanning the fifth and sixth floors. The sixth floor served as a student service area (self-study, merchandise purchase, enquiries), while the fifth floor was let out to affiliated clubs for events — for instance, a certain music society once held a competition there, drawing over a hundred participants.

Between these two moves, the cabinet's manpower was also haemorrhaging. According to the report, the "Juli" cabinet originally had 14 officers; by 2023, only Lau Jai remained, maintaining day-to-day operations as a member of the "Provisional Executive Committee" (臨時行政委員會). Lau Jai was already a Year 3 student who had spent more than 800 days cumulatively involved in student organisations — a figure that in itself shows that those who can last to the end are often the tiny minority who have long treated "going on the society" as a sustained commitment, not a one-year stint.

As for the departure of the other 13 officers, Lau Jai said: "My former cabinet members found their own goals — some wanted to study, others wanted to work," and expressed relief rather than regret. This self-account is worth recording, but should also be treated with caution: the report did not document each of the 13 individuals' specific destinations or departure dates, nor whether they were directly linked to the premises crisis or financial pressures. Existing public sources cannot verify these details one by one. This article therefore faithfully presents the outcome — a "one-man Provisional Executive Committee" — without attributing conjectural proportions to the causes.

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# 4. Self-financing: Self-help after Membership Fees Were Halved

Another layer of pressure faced by the "Juli" cabinet and its successors was financial. According to reports, the CityU administration has refused to collect Students' Union membership fees on the union's behalf since 2022 (for a full account, see the chapter "Student Society Finances, Black Boxes, and Fee Disputes"). This led to both membership numbers and fee income being halved.

To plug the fiscal gap, the union turned to two self-help measures:

• Bundling membership with affiliated clubs: students joining any affiliated club were required to become union members first, thereby broadening the membership base — a move the report described as "killing two birds with one stone";
• Premises rental and merchandise sales: letting the fifth floor to affiliated clubs for events, and selling "welfare goods" on the sixth floor (e.g., stationery priced at HK$4 for members, HK$6 for non-members) as well as self-designed union hoodies.

This series of self-help actions ultimately pointed toward one goal — self-financing, meaning complete independence from the university's fee-collection mechanism, operating instead as an off-campus commercial entity. This transition itself has already moved beyond the question of "can one cabinet smoothly hand over to the next" into an existential question of whether the union as an organisation can continue to exist outside the campus establishment.

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# 5. How an O-Camp Financial Black Hole Demolished Cabinet Morale: The 2017 Precedent

Though "Juli's" plight was extreme, the collapse of cabinet morale under fiscal pressure is not an isolated case at CityU. According to a December 2017 report by on.cc Oriental Daily^※, the CityU Students' Union's orientation camp held that summer at Pak Tam Chung ended with a loss of HK$304,000 (revenue HK$284,000, expenditure HK$588,000).

Then-president Chan Ngok-lam (陳嶽霖)^※ explained to the media the reasons for the loss: nearly half of the "group parents" (組爸組媽, the senior students leading each group) failed to pay their roughly HK$500 fees; a large number of "old ghosts" (老鬼, veteran graduated or former students) entered the camp without permission, causing the headcount to exceed the site's limit and incurring fines; some activities overran, triggering additional penalties; and bus hire for the round trip cost HK$33,000. Expenses specifically questioned by students included the purchase of 18 plastic buckets at HK$225 each (totalling HK$4,050) and a HK$14,000 venue fee for a water-fight area at Whitehead Barbecue. These figures were considered inflated by students, although the reports contain no independent verification by the university or a third-party auditor of the unit-price reasonableness.

"Filling the hole" (填氹) is a Cantonese expression that recurred throughout this incident, meaning to plug a financial deficit. Chan Ngok-lam stated that he would "cut expenses and increase revenue" by boosting tuck-shop turnover and would review financial management methods; he stressed that the union had chased the defaulters for payment, but without success.

This loss-making incident occurred five years before the "Juli" crisis, but both share the same structural root: the financial scale of O-Camps and student society operations far exceeds the complexity that one cohort of students, managing part-time with amateur experience, can normally handle safely — involving venue rental contracts, insurance, crowd control, coach hire, catering purchases, and other professional matters. Once a single link goes out of control (overspend, excess numbers, non-payment), responsibility ultimately falls on that year's president alone, who must answer to the entire membership and the university.

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# 6. A Cabinet-Term PR Disaster: The 2018 Editorial Board's "University Name Mockery" Incident

Pressure on a cabinet does not arise only from finances and manpower; it can also stem from the public backlash triggered by a single misjudgment. The 2018 editorial board's Orientation Special controversy is a textbook case in CityU student governance history of "internal cabinet decision → public explosion → emergency damage control".

According to reports by Oriental Daily^※ and on.cc Oriental Daily^※, the cover of the August 2018 orientation special published by the CityU Students' Union Editorial Board altered the university's English name "City" to read "Shitty", while the full Chinese name was correspondingly changed to "又一城市大學" (Yet Another City University) — both being long-circulating, mockingly playful nicknames for the university. Upon discovering this, the university issued a warning to the editorial board on 9 August, stating that the manner in which the university's logo had been used might cause "confusion". It demanded that the editorial board cover up the cover and apologise. The editorial board subsequently issued an apology and decided to cease distribution of that issue, also admitting that the orientation layout contained other "human errors and technical issues".

The public reaction to this incident was relatively fierce — some netizens criticised the board members responsible for the publication for "not respecting the school they attend", arguing that an orientation publication, aimed at new students, ought to preserve their anticipation of university life rather than "stealing a march" through mockery. Some further pointed out that the editorial board's English apology statement itself contained grammatical errors, amplifying the embarrassment.

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# 7. The 'Broken Society' Phenomenon: A Widespread Pressure Across Hong Kong Universities, Which CityU Has Not Escaped

According to a 2021 report by HK01^※, affected by the pandemic and "broken societies" (斷莊), none of Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded institutions had a student union orientation camp that year — "broken society" refers to a situation where no one runs for election for a given student organisation, or the number of candidates falls below the legal threshold, preventing a smooth transition and leaving a power vacuum or necessitating ad hoc mechanisms to maintain operations. This is not a CityU-specific phenomenon, but a structural pressure faced by the entire tertiary sector: as "going on the society" is widely perceived as time-consuming, cliquish, and reliant on personal ties, the number of students willing to commit a full year of their free time has dwindled year by year.

In recent years, the CityU Students' Union has repeatedly operated under the name of a "Provisional Executive Committee" (臨時幹事會) — according to the union's orientation publicity platform, it once issued public announcements as the "41st Provisional Executive Committee". This phenomenon dovetails closely with "broken societies": it is not that no students care about union affairs, but rather that it is difficult to assemble an entire cabinet that fulfils all the requirements of the constitution, leaving the union to maintain basic functions in a "provisional" capacity while awaiting the next opportunity for a proper election.

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# 8. The Other Side of 'Going on the Society': Anecdotes from the Student-Society Underworld Shared Across Hong Kong Campuses

When we place the CityU case back into the wider coordinate system of Hong Kong's tertiary institutions, it becomes clear that the dramatic scenes bred by "going-on-the-society" pressure are not unique to CityU. According to a HK01 compilation of classic student-society episodes over the years^※, the culture of "dem beat" (a rhythmic chant-and-clap ritual for society promotion) that circulates through Hong Kong's campuses has witnessed spectacles such as a candidate cabinet member losing emotional control at an election campaign event and publicly "overturning a table" (反枱), now recounted by word of mouth as a "classic episode". The veracity and details of such anecdotes are hard to verify individually; this article does not incorporate them as CityU-specific historical facts, treating them only as background reference for grasping the overall atmosphere of "going-on-the-society" election culture — high pressure, high emotional investment, and group competition.

What truly sets the CityU cases apart from ordinary campus legends is that each of the events recounted above is supported by verifiable dates, places, amounts, or official responses: the "Juli" cabinet's personnel shrinking from 14 to 1 is corroborated by The Collective's named interview with the president; the 2017 O-Camp loss of HK$304,000 comes with specific revenue and expenditure figures; the 2018 editorial board controversy is attested by the university's warning and the board's apology. This distinction between "verifiable" and "hearsay" is precisely the credibility-grading principle this site repeatedly emphasises when dealing with student-society disputes — there are plenty of entertaining anecdotes, but only those that have left a trace are written into the official account.

# 9. After the Disintegration: Who Takes Over, and What Gets Handed Over?

The experience ultimately left behind by the "Juli" cabinet is perhaps worthier of record than the crises it endured: even when reduced to a single person, Lau Jai chose to remain as a member of the Provisional Executive Committee rather than allow the union to fall into a complete power vacuum. This posture of "holding the fort to the very end" is not rare in the context of Hong Kong student self-governance — in every "broken-society" year, there is always an individual student willing to keep the most basic organisational existence afloat in a "provisional" capacity, even if it means shouldering alone a workload originally meant to be spread across a dozen people.

For those who come after, the practical question left by this history is: can a "Provisional Executive Committee" consisting of a single person fully hand over the society constitution, official chops, bank accounts, years of activity records, and contact networks to the next properly elected cabinet? Existing public sources lack systematic documentation of such transfer details. This article accordingly marks the boundary of its sources plainly — how a "one-man Provisional Executive Committee" smoothly (or unsmoothly) transitions back to a formally elected cabinet remains an unsettled question in the study of student power at CityU, and one worth tracking in the future.

::: info Source limitations This article is primarily compiled from media reports by The Collective, HK01, on.cc, and others. The specific statements of presidents Lau Jai and Chan Ngok-lam are reproduced as relayed through the media. Existing public sources lack internal union meeting minutes to corroborate certain details (such as the specific timings and individual reasons for the departure of the 13 officers). Names are handled according to published reports; the identities of other serving or departed students are simplified in general. :::

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