Lee Woo Sing College: Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony, Lee Woo Sing and an Anonymous Gift of HK$150 Million

In October 2007, an anonymous donor gave the Chinese University HK$150 million to found a new college. For more than two full years, neither CUHK nor the wider public knew who the donor was; the mystery was only resolved in January 2010 — the donor was Dr. Li Hexin (李和鑫), a member of the Tianjin Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) for Hong Kong and Macau, who named the college in honour of his elder brother Lee Woo Sing (李和声). Lee Woo Sing College thus became, among the nine new colleges, the one with the most suspenseful founding story. Its motto, "Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony" (知仁忠和), derives from the Rites of Zhou (《周礼》), and its final character, "harmony", deliberately echoes the college's name. More than a decade on, this college of "harmony" has weathered a smart-card privacy controversy and an unauthorised conversion dispute, and in January 2026 its Student Union suspended operations — the final chapter in the wave of suspensions across the nine colleges' student unions.

This is an in-depth dossier on Lee Woo Sing College, far more detailed than the Lee Woo Sing section of the volume overview. It focuses on the college's origins, naming and donation, positioning, landmarks, traditions, controversies and recent institutional upheaval. The new colleges have short histories; where public material is limited, this article prefers to say less rather than pad out the record.

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# 1. Basic overview

Lee Woo Sing College is one of the colleges founded at CUHK from 2007 onwards. Together with Wu Yee Sun College, it belongs to the "medium-sized, partially residential" tier of roughly 1,200 students. Its founding is distinctive for a celebrated tale of an "anonymous mega-gift, revealed three years later".

The college stands on a slope along Residence Road, next to United College's Chan Chun Ha Hostel. The campus was designed by Rocco Yim and built by Tysan Foundation and Hsin Chong Construction, using "spiral pile and temporary steel platform" techniques to cope with the terrain. LG3 houses a multi-purpose auditorium, the LG2 canteen is operated by LSG Sky Chefs, and the college provides roughly 600 places of residence.

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# 2. Naming and donation: an anonymous mega-gift

# The anonymous donation and its revelation in 2010

According to Wikipedia (Chinese), "Lee Woo Sing College"^※, in October 2007 an anonymous donor gave CUHK HK$150 million to establish this new college. The donor's identity was initially kept secret and only revealed in January 2010: the donor was Dr. Li Hexin (a member of the CPPCC Tianjin Municipal Committee for Hong Kong and Macau), and the college was named after his elder brother Lee Woo Sing. This sequence — anonymity first, revelation later — sets Lee Woo Sing College apart among the nine new colleges: in the other four, the donor's identity was public from the moment the gift was announced. Only Lee Woo Sing went through a "suspense period" of more than two years.

# Lee Woo Sing: from Shanghai bullion-shop apprentice to "Imperial Cat"

According to Wikipedia (Chinese), "Lee Woo Sing"^※ and Sing Tao Daily, "Financial sector elder Lee Woo Sing passes away"^※, Lee Woo Sing (1928 – 27 October 2022) was a native of Ningbo, Zhejiang, born in Shanghai. According to CUHK CUHKUPDates, "The Harmonious Elder Lee Woo Sing"^※, his family had originally run a shipping business but declined because of the wars; at fourteen he became an apprentice at a Shanghai bullion shop to support the family, and at 19 he opened his own gold shop, "Sheng Da Yong" (生大永), dealing in gold bullion. In 1951 (by some accounts 1950, at age 23) he moved south to Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, Lee worked at the Far East Exchange, and in 1986 he became one of the founding governors of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. According to Sing Tao Daily^※, during the 1998 Asian financial crisis his Shun Loong Group was among the securities firms selected to counter international speculators, earning him the nickname "Imperial Cat" (御猫); he was also known in Hong Kong financial circles as the "bottom-fishing king" and the "broker of the super-rich". CUHKUPDates reports that during the 1987 stock-market crash he personally shouldered his company's debts and mortgaged his own home to preserve his credibility, saying of himself, "From youth to now, my integrity has never been compromised" — an episode the official narrative reads as a real-world gloss on the "integrity" (忠) of the college motto.

Lee's ties with CUHK long predated the founding of Lee Woo Sing College: according to Lee Woo Sing College official site, "Founders"^※, he served as vice-chairman of the Shaw College Board of Trustees from 1999; in 1993 he helped arrange a HK$13.5 million donation from the Shanghai Fraternity Association to CUHK to establish the University's Science and Technology Research Centre; and in 2000 he launched the "Home in Hong Kong" (家在香江) family-care programme, a collaboration between the Shanghai Fraternity Association and CUHK to care for mainland-China undergraduates studying at the University. He also served on the Election Committee of the first and second terms of the HKSAR government, as financial adviser to the Tianjin municipal government and a recipient of its "Honorary Citizen" title, and devoted himself to promoting Peking opera in Hong Kong and mainland China, organising "revival" (zhenxing) opera clubs with several noted performers and fostering Hong Kong–Shanghai opera exchanges.

# Li Hexin: the Binghuatang Li family foundation and "brotherly deference"

According to Lee Woo Sing College official site, "Founders"^※, the donor Dr. Li Hexin is a member of the Ningbo Binghuatang (秉花堂) Li family. He moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1990, and shifted his centre of life to Taiwan in 2015. In 2007, at the invitation of then Vice-Chancellor Professor Lawrence J. Lau, he joined with the Binghuatang Li Family Foundation to fund the creation of Lee Woo Sing College, naming it after his elder brother Lee Woo Sing — an act that, in the official account, both honoured his brother's contribution to Hong Kong education and embodied the Confucian ethic of "brotherly deference between elder and younger" (兄友弟恭). Li Hexin currently serves as a founding director and deputy secretary-general of the "Cross-Strait Public Opinion Representatives Foundation" (海峡两岸民意代表基金会), working to promote cross-strait exchanges.

# The origin of the name "Lee Woo Sing"

According to Lee Woo Sing College official site, "Founders" page^※, Lee Woo Sing (Dr. Lee Woo Sing) was originally named "Wu Xing"; when he began his apprenticeship at fourteen, his father renamed him "Woo Sing" ("harmony" and "voice"), with the intent that he should prize harmony above all and be of one voice with his friends — the two characters "Woo Sing" themselves carry a philosophy of life. Naming the college after this elder both commemorates him and injects the spirit of "harmony" into the college's culture. In Lee's later years, family remained the core of his life — according to CUHKUPDates, he regarded "cultivating oneself and putting one's family in order" (修身齐家) as a precondition for "giving back to society", and "whenever he had spare money, he would give within his means" to support education.

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# 3. The motto "Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony" and the college song

According to Lee Woo Sing College (English Wikipedia)^※ and Lee Woo Sing College official site, "College Signature"^※, the college motto is "Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony" (知仁忠和), which derives from the Rites of Zhou (one of the Three Rites classics). In the official interpretation, the first two characters — "wisdom" (知) and "humanity" (仁) — emphasise the cultivation of learning and moral character, while the last two — "integrity" (忠) and "harmony" (和) — emphasise the right attitude in dealing with others: knowing, benevolence, loyalty, harmony. The final character of the motto, "harmony" (和), deliberately echoes the "Sing" of the college's Chinese name; the name and the motto thus reinforce each other.

The college song, titled "The Voice of Harmony" (《和谐之声》), was composed by Peter Kam, a celebrated Hong Kong film score composer, with lyrics by Kwok Ka-chun — it is unusual among the nine colleges for a professional musician to have composed a bespoke college song, and it chimes with the inherently musical resonance of the name "Woo Sing".

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# 4. Positioning and landmarks

# A medium-sized, partially residential college

Lee Woo Sing's scale of roughly 1,200 students (600 residents, 600 non-residents) matches Wu Yee Sun College, placing it in the "medium-sized, partially residential" tier among the new colleges. Although residence is not compulsory, the resident community is very active. According to Lee Woo Sing College official site, admissions page^※, by the 2023/24 academic year enrolled students had grown to about 1,550 (85% local, 15% non-local), exceeding the initial planned cap of 1,200; local students' success rate for hall places is around 65%, while non-local students are guaranteed three years of residence. The college has three Deans of Students and about 90 college tutors, giving a staff–student ratio of roughly 1:17.

# The campus: two hostel blocks, north and south

According to Wikipedia (Chinese), "Lee Woo Sing College"^※, the college campus was designed by architect Rocco Yim, with construction completed in mid-2012 — Yim also designed Morningside, S.H. Ho and several other new colleges, giving this batch of colleges a family resemblance in architectural language. The college is built into a slope beside Residence Road, with spiral-pile and temporary steel-platform techniques used to cope with the terrain. According to Lee Woo Sing College official site, campus introduction^※, the campus sits halfway up the hill on Residence Road in the western part of the University, with views over Tolo Harbour and Pat Sin Leng; the administrative offices are on the ground floor of the "Dorothy and Ti-hua KOO Building" (顾李瑞华大楼).

According to CUTSA College Handbook, "Lee Woo Sing College"^※, the hostels are divided into a North Block and a South Block, similar in facilities but each with its own emphasis: the North Block has fewer floors and easier lift access, with a gym on the ground level; the South Block is taller, with more recreational facilities, and also houses the administrative offices. Rooms are more spacious than in other colleges and come with a refrigerator, air-conditioning and heating; every two floors share a common room, kitchen, multimedia room, study room and laundry facilities. Rooms facing Tolo Harbour are described as having "the best views in the college". First-year students must share a room with a local student; from senior years onward, students may choose their own roommate. The college has 624 hall places, and rooms also come with electric fans.

On the dining front, according to the official admissions page and English Wikipedia, the college houses the WS Pavilion canteen (originally operated by LSG Sky Chefs), The Harmony Shanghainese Restaurant and Café Tolo, plus a convenience store; LG3 has a multi-purpose auditorium, and there is also a 78-seat theatre, gym, dance studio, computer room and an outdoor barbecue area.

# Access control: among the nine colleges, "relatively strict" gates

From the student perspective described in CUTSA College Handbook^※, Lee Woo Sing is called the "only college that controls entry relatively strictly" — entry to the college and to hostel floors requires card swiping. This characteristic is of a piece with the 2012 WS Access Plus privacy controversy described in Section 8 below: more than a decade on, strict access control has evolved from a topic of controversy into an everyday feature of the college, seen by current students as a safeguard for dormitory security rather than simply a privacy burden.

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# 5. College traditions

• The culture of "harmony": named "Woo Sing" and guided by the motto "Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony", harmony is the underlying tone of the college community, and its activities emphasise communication, collaboration and inclusiveness.
• The college song, "The Voice of Harmony": composed by Peter Kam with lyrics by Kwok Ka-chun, one of the rare cases among the nine colleges of a college song written by a well-known professional musician.
• College general education: according to the Office of University General Education^※, Lee Woo Sing's college GE curriculum is designed around its "Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony" philosophy, emphasising moral character, communication and whole-person development.
• Internationalisation and exchange: the college emphasises developing students' international perspective and runs exchange and study-tour programmes.
• The orientation camp "Woo Sing beat": according to CUTSA College Handbook^※, the Lee Woo Sing orientation camp is in principle compulsory but in practice optional; its college cheer, the "Woo Sing beat", is a shared memory for successive cohorts of freshmen. The college's anniversary celebrations are usually held around the Lunar New Year.

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# 6. College life and student organisations

According to Lee Woo Sing College official site, admissions page^※, the college and its Student Union together hold more than 60 events each year, and students can join more than 30 affiliated clubs and teams spanning sports, music, social service and media — the backbone of everyday college life.

# Sports: WS Sports and the WS Master Cup

According to the WS Sports^※ official page, the college fields teams in badminton, basketball, rowing, football, swimming, table tennis, tennis, athletics and volleyball, trained regularly by professional coaches and competing in inter-college and University-wide fixtures; the Woo Sing Sports Association (WSSA) coordinates the promotion of sport across the college. The annual WS Master Cup features table tennis, basketball and table football, and is one of the college's traditional events in which members compete and build team rapport.

# College general education and the credit-bearing orientation course

According to the Office of University General Education^※ and CUTSA College Handbook^※, Lee Woo Sing students must complete 6 credits of college GE, of which the freshman seminar (course code GEWS1012) includes small-group projects, field trips and a social-service component, and attendance can affect graduation eligibility. Unlike the compulsory full-residency, communal-dining model of Morningside, S.H. Ho and C.W. Chu, Lee Woo Sing — like Wu Yee Sun — takes a more relaxed approach, requiring "attendance at at least two high-table dinners or round-table events per semester". This difference is one compromise point on the spectrum of college-GE systems across the nine colleges, between the "big-college flexibility" and "new-college strictness" poles.

# Environment-oriented admissions and orientation

According to CUTSA College Handbook^※, Lee Woo Sing's freshman selection includes an environmental-protection questionnaire and a telephone interview, and environmental themes run through the design of everyday college activities — a detail that gives the college, among the nine, a distinctive "sustainability" emphasis that nonetheless chimes with its "Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony" motto.

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# 7. Heads of college

According to Wikipedia (Chinese), "Lee Woo Sing College"^※ and Lee Woo Sing College official site, "Founders"^※, the founding Head was Professor Joseph Lau Wan-yee (22 June 1947 – 7 February 2024), an internationally renowned hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgeon and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Lau joined the CUHK Faculty of Medicine in 1989, served as chairman of the Department of Surgery from 1996 to 2001, chaired the International and Asia-Pacific Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Associations and the Medical Council of Hong Kong, and was awarded the Silver Bauhinia Star in 2013; he devoted his career to surgery and research on hepatocellular carcinoma, hilar cholangiocarcinoma radical resection and liver transplantation, and was one of the founders of liver transplantation in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to official sources, CUHK announced in June 2008 that Lau would be the Head-designate, and in January 2010 he was formally appointed Head of Lee Woo Sing College, serving for fourteen years until he died in the evening of 7 February 2024, surrounded by his family, aged 76 — the longest-serving of all the nine colleges' Heads, and the only one to die in office. As Sing Tao Daily^※ reported, he had stepped down as chairman of the Medical Council only at the end of the previous month before his sudden passing.

The current Head is Professor Yam Yeung. According to public sources, Yam is the President of CUHK Shenzhen Research Institute and a Research Professor in the University's Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering; he succeeded Lau as the college's second Head on 1 July 2024.

For living persons, only neutral facts are recorded; the list of Heads follows official and authoritative sources.

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# 8. Controversies: smart-card privacy, dormitory security and unauthorised conversion

Across more than a decade, Lee Woo Sing College has experienced three specific controversies worth recording, all supported by public reporting.

# 2012: the WS Access Plus smart-card privacy controversy

In late 2012 the college announced the introduction of a smart-card access system called WS Access Plus, requiring students to swipe their cards to enter the college, hostel floors, and even individual rooms and washrooms. The move drew concern among students, the core worry being that extensive records of individual comings and goings would be retained by the system, posing a privacy risk. According to public information, this controversy never escalated into a large-scale formal complaint or external investigation, but it reflected the general sensitivity among staff and students about privacy boundaries in the early days of campus smart access systems.

# October 2015: intrusion into the female hostel

According to public reporting, in October 2015 an unidentified man entered the female hostel floors of Lee Woo Sing College. The incident is mentioned in some material discussing the college's hostel security, but the public record on the specific sequence of events, the identity of the person involved and the outcome is limited.

Reliability note: this incident is mentioned in scattered public records; the specific details (whether the police were called, whether a criminal investigation followed, and what remedial measures were taken) have not been the subject of any thorough authoritative follow-up reporting. Reliability: single source. It is recorded here purely as part of the historical record on campus security, without embellishment.

# 2018–2019: the unauthorised conversion of LG1

According to public reporting, from June 2018 the college converted the LG1 floor's original student common area into two "scholar flats". In June 2019, someone exposed that the conversion plan "did not match the approved plans and was suspected of unauthorised building work", triggering a dispute between the Buildings Department and the University over the approval of the works. The controversy touches a specific and common campus-governance issue: public common space quietly put to another use, with the conversion not fully declared in accordance with regulations — a category of dispute with parallels in the hostel-management history of other CUHK colleges, best understood in the wider context of "how colleges use and adapt public space".

Reliability note: the LG1 unauthorised conversion is mentioned in public reporting with specific years and the allegation that the works "did not match the approved plans". Reliability: corroborated by multiple sources; however, the Buildings Department's final findings and the college's subsequent remedial measures have not been fully disclosed in the public record.

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# 9. January 2026: suspension of the Student Union — the last in the wave

On 3 January 2026, the Lee Woo Sing College Student Union informed students that, owing to "force majeure factors", the 2025/26 handover election was to be suspended with immediate effect, and all candidate cabinets were required to cease campaigning at once. Two weeks later, in the evening of 16 January, the Lee Woo Sing College Student Union issued a farewell letter formally announcing its closure.

This is the fifth case in the wave of student-union suspensions across CUHK's nine colleges, and to date the last: the C.W. Chu (January 2025), Shaw (21 December 2025), Wu Yee Sun (23 December 2025) and New Asia (27–28 December 2025) college student unions had already ceased operations. The University's public line, as reported by Epoch Times^※, was that only student organisations that had completed independent registration could operate, and that it would not recognise bodies claiming to be college student unions or their members if they had not registered independently under the Companies Ordinance or the Societies Ordinance. The Lee Woo Sing union's use of "force majeure factors" to suspend its election — a euphemistic formulation — stands in sharp contrast to the blunt farewell letter of the New Asia union, which declared that "shared governance by staff and students is thoroughly dead". The contrast reflects how the various college student unions chose quite different registers of public statement as they wound down.

There is a certain irony in the fact that this college — named for "harmony", with "harmony" as the final character of its motto — saw its Student Union end with the euphemistic phrase "force majeure", rather than the fierce farewell letter of New Asia. This article presents the two side by side purely on the basis of public reports and offers no subjective commentary on the contrast. The issue sits within a university-wide policy context and the full picture of five college unions suspending; see Section 6 of college-expansion-334-reform.md.

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# 10. Anecdotes and rumours (low reliability)

Reliability note: the material in this section is largely campus folklore, word-of-mouth or internet-forum anecdotes. It has not been confirmed by authoritative sources and is of low reliability; it is offered for cultural interest only and should not be cited as fact. This site does not report subjective judgements about living persons; the following anecdotes do not correspond to any real individual.

Speculation before the "anonymous donor" was revealed

During the period from 2007 to 2010 when the donor's identity was kept secret, the campus and the media offered various guesses about who the anonymous donor might be. Note: the donor's identity was officially announced by the University in January 2010 as Dr. Li Hexin, with the college named after his brother Lee Woo Sing. The various pre-revelation speculations are now moot and were mostly idle conjecture; this site records only the officially announced facts and does not rehearse the old guesses.

The jest that "Lee Woo Sing = the most harmonious / least conflict-ridden college"

Because the college is named "Woo Sing" and takes "Wisdom, Humanity, Integrity, Harmony" as its motto, people occasionally joke that "Lee Woo Sing is the most harmonious / least disputatious college on campus". Note: this is a purely literal play on the college's name, with no objective basis whatsoever; its reliability is low and it is only conversation. Given that the college has itself weathered a smart-card privacy controversy and an unauthorised conversion dispute, the "most harmonious" label reads more as a well-meaning joke than a statement of fact.

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