Campus Broadcasting and the Student Radio: The Sound Lineage of CUHK Student Media

⚠ This article belongs to the wild-history module (15 Campus Lore · Anecdotes · Societies). It focuses on the "sound / audiovisual" strand of CUHK student media's institutional lineage, built primarily on publicly sourced facts, presented through attributive juxtaposition. Living, named individuals are handled throughout as "Mr./Ms. [Surname]" or by office title. The political background of the 2021 student union continuity dispute is not developed in this article; this piece records only its direct effect on the campus radio as an institution. The print strand (the student newspaper, U-Beat) is covered separately in student-media-and-press-freedom.md.

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A free student newspaper is easy to remember; a recording of a council meeting that left no paper trail and only ever streamed on YouTube is easy to forget. Ask most people about CUHK student media and they think first of the black-and-white pages of The Chinese University Student Press and U-Beat. But under the student union there is also another lineage — one of "sound" — a campus radio station that pointed its cameras at meeting rooms and handed the microphone to fellow students. This piece traces that sound lineage: when it was founded, what it did, where it was based, why it livestreamed council meetings, and how it quietly came to an end in 2022.

One-line conclusion: CUHK Campus Radio was founded in 1999 under the CUHK Student Union, dedicated to audiovisual programming and to livestreaming Council and Judicial Committee hearings; its office-bearers' terms expired in February 2022, it vacated its room in Benjamin Franklin Centre in April, and its run came to a close after roughly twenty-three years.

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# What Is CUHK Campus Radio? When Was It Founded and Which Organisation Does It Belong To?

CUHK Campus Radio (CUHK Campus Radio) is one of the CUHK Student Union's two statutory media bodies, the other being The Chinese University Student Press. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry's account of the CUHK Student Union's structure^※, the radio station's editorial board "was formally established in 1999" as a standing body of the student union, accountable to the Student Union Council and to the general membership. Counting from its founding year, by the time it ceased operating in 2022 this student radio station had existed for roughly twenty-three years.

In terms of its role, Campus Radio and the student newspaper occupy opposite ends of "sound" and "text." According to the same source, the radio's constitutional mandate is to produce radio programming, reflect student opinion and school policy, and report on student activities, and it further states that the station shall "strive to obtain a terrestrial broadcasting licence." This licence clause is telling: it shows that, in its institutional self-conception, Campus Radio once aspired to be a genuine "radio station" rather than merely a social-media content account — though over its more than two decades of existence, this wireless broadcasting licence remained words on the page and was never actually obtained.

One distinction worth making up front: in the CUHK context, "Campus Radio" refers to student-union-run autonomous media, not a teaching facility of the School of Journalism and Communication. It is run by an editorial board within the student union's structure, and its editorial direction is decided autonomously by students — the same footing as the student newspaper. The only difference is that the student newspaper speaks through print, while Campus Radio speaks through image and sound. Understanding this distinction is the starting point for reading the whole sound lineage.

# Where Does Campus Radio Sit Within the Student Union? Why Is Its Editorial Board Called "RingTone"?

To understand Campus Radio's standing, one first has to see its place within the CUHK Student Union (CUSU). According to The Chinese University Student Press's account of the student union's structure^※, the CUHK Student Union was founded in 1971, and its central structure comprises five parts: the Council (legislative), the Judicial Committee (judicial), the Executive Committee (executive), and the two media bodies — The Chinese University Student Press and CUHK Campus Radio. In other words, Campus Radio is not an ordinary student society but one of the statutory media bodies written into the student union's structure alongside the "three branches"; its survival or dissolution bears directly on the union's overall institutional makeup.

Campus Radio's editorial board also goes by another name — "RingTone" (稜声). According to Campus Radio's official page^※ and other public material, this editorial board identifies itself externally as "RingTone." Student-union media have a tradition of giving each term's editorial board a name (the print lineage's editorial boards each have one too); "RingTone" is to Campus Radio what each term's chosen name is to the student newspaper's editorial board — it turns a group of students making audiovisual content into a named, cohesive editorial collective.

In terms of distribution channels, Campus Radio is very much a "multi-platform" student medium. According to its public accounts, its content is spread across a Facebook page, a YouTube channel^※, Instagram, and a Medium blog called "radioccu." This form — "no dedicated airwaves of its own, relying entirely on online platforms" — stands in some contrast to that unfulfilled constitutional clause about "striving to obtain a terrestrial broadcasting licence": it aspired to be a licensed radio station, yet ultimately operated for over two decades as an audiovisual account on social media.

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# From Chung Chi to Benjamin Franklin Centre: Where Was Campus Radio Physically Based?

A student radio station needs a room where it can record, edit, and stow equipment. According to Wikipedia's account of the student union's affiliated media^※, CUHK Campus Radio's office was originally located in Chung Chi College's Lee Wai Chun Building (rooms 113 and 116); in July 2013, the station moved to the third floor of Benjamin Franklin Centre, occupying rooms 301 to 303.

Benjamin Franklin Centre is a hub of CUHK student activity — the student union, student newspaper, Campus Radio, and other autonomous organisations long kept their rooms clustered here, with the student canteen downstairs. Moving the station from a college building at Chung Chi to the third floor of Benjamin Franklin Centre put the "sound" and "text" lineages, in a sense, next door to each other: according to the sources, the student newspaper's room was likewise on the third floor of Benjamin Franklin Centre (room 307). The two student-union media bodies faced each other across a corridor, an arrangement that lasted until the overall shutdown of student-union media.

Where this base ultimately ended up also forms the closing point of Campus Radio's story. Room 302 in Benjamin Franklin Centre became, in 2022, the site the station vacated (see the "Closing Chapter" section below) — the emptying of a recording room brought this sound lineage to a close.

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# What Programmes Did Campus Radio Make? — Four Regular Programmes, Audiovisual and Audio Alike

Contrary to what the word "radio" might suggest, CUHK Campus Radio was, in its later period, primarily video-based, with audio as a secondary format. According to a Chinese University Student Press feature introducing Campus Radio^※, the station ran four regular programmes, three of them video and one audio-only:

The programme names themselves carry CUHK's geography and everyday texture: "22.3°N" is roughly the campus's latitude; "Hill City" is the affectionate name staff and students use for the hillside campus; "Four Pillars" (四条柱) is Cantonese slang evoking a banquet setting, commonly used as a wry label for men chatting over a meal; and "Sesame Paste, Mung Bean Soup" names two everyday Hong Kong dessert-shop staples. Together, the four programmes sketch out a student radio content spectrum where "the serious and the playful sit side by side" — discussing campus politics as well as dessert soup; pointing the camera at meeting rooms as well as handing the microphone to students chatting casually. This "half current-affairs, half everyday-life" mix is precisely what most distinguishes a student autonomous radio station from a professional news outlet: it need not chase ratings or timeliness, and can make both a current-affairs programme and a purely conversational talk show.

According to the same source, Campus Radio's own description of its role leans toward "campus media" rather than "advocacy group": it prioritises compiling information and reporting, and is less inclined to actively advocate politically, while reserving room to speak out when student interests are seriously harmed. This self-positioning contrasts with the student newspaper's tradition of "testing the boundaries of speech through a provocative stance" (see the print-media article) — both are student-union media, but one leans toward "recording," the other toward "taking positions."

The station has also described itself as a low-barrier creative platform. Its recruitment pitch reads: "Whether you want to shoot video, record audio, DJ, mix, or act, the station can give you a chance to discover yourself"^※. This somewhat colloquial recruitment line reveals how Campus Radio positioned itself in attracting members: not just a news operation, but also a society where students could practise audiovisual craft.

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# Why Call It "the Student Union's Livestream Room"? — A Machine-Readable Record of Council Meetings and Hearings

If the student newspaper left CUHK a paper archive, what Campus Radio left behind is a body of video records of meetings and hearings. According to Campus Radio's YouTube channel^※, the station livestreamed and archived, over a long period, meetings of the CUHK Student Union's Council (the union's legislative body) on YouTube — the channel contains full recordings of multiple Council sessions, including the "48th Term Regular Council Meeting" and the "49th Term Extraordinary Council Meeting." For a period, this meant that the most direct way to find out what had been said at the student union's "legislature" was not to read the meeting minutes, but to watch Campus Radio's archived livestream.

Besides the Council, Campus Radio also livestreamed public hearings of the student union's Judicial Committee (the union's highest judicial body). According to its channel records, the station livestreamed hearings such as "JCFI 01/2017" (concerning a student-newspaper election dispute) and "JCFI 01/2019" — hearings concerning internal student-union election and constitutional disputes (for example, election-committee disputes arising from the student newspaper's annual elections) — with Campus Radio recording and archiving them in full, in something close to a "courtroom broadcast" style. For a student self-governing organisation, having election disputes heard publicly by the Judicial Committee and then fully livestreamed by Campus Radio formed a closed loop of "student-run public accountability."

The significance of these livestreams lies not in viewership but in the record they leave behind. Minutes of Council meetings and Judicial Committee rulings, if they exist only as paper or internal documents, are easily lost as terms turn over; by turning them into watchable, searchable video, Campus Radio effectively preserved a "real-time transcript" of student self-governance history. Making the legislative and judicial processes of a student self-governing organisation public and rewatchable constituted a distinctive public function that set Campus Radio apart from other societies: it did not produce opinion, but turned the student union's governance process into a searchable, machine-readable archive.

This function also entwined Campus Radio tightly with the institutional history of the student union. It was both a recorder of student self-governance and one of the first bodies affected whenever student-union operations stalled — because once the Council and Judicial Committee stopped functioning, the "subjects" that gave the station's livestreams their reason to exist also disappeared. Seen another way, Campus Radio's rise and fall functioned almost as a thermometer for the health of the student union's institutions: the more meetings held and hearings convened, the busier the station's cameras; and once meetings and hearings fell silent, this sound lineage, too, reached its end.

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# How Did Sound and Text Divide the Work? — Campus Radio's Place in the Student Media Landscape

Placing Campus Radio back within CUHK's full student media landscape reveals a clear three-way structure. According to The Chinese University Student Press's account of the student union's structure^※ and Wikipedia, the three occupy distinct positions:

The relationship among the three is not one of parallel equivalents but a cross of "medium × affiliation." Campus Radio and the student newspaper are both student-union autonomous media, run by a directly-elected editorial board with editorial independence; U-Beat, by contrast, is a school practicum publication, run by the School of Journalism and Communication and centred on training. Campus Radio's distinctiveness among the three is that it is the only one whose primary medium is audiovisual — while the student newspaper recorded controversies in text and U-Beat trained reporters through investigative journalism, Campus Radio "recorded" meeting rooms, hearing chambers, and everyday hill-city life through the camera.

This "sound lineage" has another, often-overlooked half: alongside the student union's autonomous radio station, there is the School of Journalism and Communication's own strand of professional broadcast training. According to the School of Journalism and Communication's introduction to its "Journalism and Communication" programme^※, the programme emphasises practice and offers multiple internship and production platforms — besides the text-oriented U-Beat and Varsity, it also includes video and new-media production platforms such as "jcMotion" and the "Creative Media Laboratory." If Campus Radio is the audiovisual outlet for students' "autonomous voice," the school's production platforms treat broadcasting, film, and multimedia as a profession to be trained for — both belong to CUHK's "sound / audiovisual" ecosystem, but they run on two different logics, "autonomy" and "training," echoing the same divide described in the print-media article between The Chinese University Student Press and U-Beat.

According to the programme's own description, the "Journalism and Communication" major is divided into three tracks — "Journalism," "Advertising and Public Relations," and "Creative and New Media" — with graduates going on to online media, radio, television, and film/television production companies, among other paths. In other words, CUHK has both a student-run, editorially autonomous campus radio, and a school-based teaching lineage that trains broadcast and film talent to professional standards. The former rose and fell with the student union's continuity; the latter, as a departmental institution, is far more stable. This is also why discussing CUHK's "sound lineage" cannot look only at the student-union line: what has actually kept "broadcasting" alive at CUHK is not only a student radio station that has since vacated its room, but also an entire, still-operating school of communication. One lineage autonomous, one professional — together they form the complete sound landscape.

It is worth noting that the "sound" function of student-union media saw one institutional episode during the years leading up to its shutdown. According to the print-media article, between 2015 and 2016 both the student newspaper and Campus Radio simultaneously fell vacant; the then-Executive Committee, bypassing the Council, set up on its own initiative a "Campus Reporters Group" to try to fill the gap, which the Council designated an unlawful body a year later. This procedural dispute over "who defines the legitimacy of campus media" involved both vacant bodies — the student newspaper and Campus Radio — and its full account can be found in student-media-and-press-freedom.md; this article notes only that Campus Radio's standing as a statutory media body was, in that episode too, among the things contested.

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# Was There "Broadcasting" on the Hill Before Campus Radio? — An Unverifiable Sound Prehistory

Students often assume, understandably, that a hillside university built around a cluster of colleges must have had some form of campus broadcasting before 1999 — dormitory-corridor speakers, song requests in a college dining hall, a live microphone at orientation camp.

There is occasional word-of-mouth about "early college broadcasting" or a "dormitory song-request booth," but as of this article's compilation, no reliable public source has been found confirming that an institutionalised, named student broadcasting body existed at CUHK before Campus Radio's founding in 1999. The only confirmable mechanism is this one: Campus Radio's editorial board was formally established in 1999 and written into the student union's structure (per the Wikipedia account). Whatever "broadcasting" existed before that was more likely scattered live amplification at orientation camps and college events, rather than a continuously operating media organisation with a constitution and a roster. This article draws no conclusion here, only a juxtaposition: what is documented is the institutional starting point in 1999; what is undocumented is the oral prehistory before it.

This "undocumented prehistory" itself points to something worth noting: campus sound memory is very easily lost. Print media leave bound volumes and library holdings, while broadcast and live amplification, unless someone records and archives them, dissipate along with the sound waves. Campus Radio's later insistence on archiving Council meetings and hearings on YouTube was, in a sense, a remedy for exactly this — the fact that sound is fleeting.

Precisely because of this, the "documented starting point" of this sound lineage stands out as clean and isolated: before 1999 lies a blank with no reliable documentation; only after the editorial board was written into the constitution in 1999 did a continuous institution, a name ("RingTone"), and later a rewatchable video archive come into being. This article prefers to mark that boundary honestly — starting the documented account from 1999, and leaving the undocumented part in the realm of hearsay — rather than stretching scattered live amplification into a claimed "predecessor of the radio station" merely to make the sound lineage seem longer. Campus memory deserves to be taken seriously, and taking it seriously means being clear about what is documented and what is only word of mouth.

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# The 2022 Closing Chapter: Terms Expiring and the Move Out of Benjamin Franklin Centre

The winding-down of CUHK Campus Radio coincided with the broader shutdown of student-union media. According to an official statement from CUHK's Communications and Public Relations Office^※, under the original student union structure, the university had continued for a time to provide administrative support to student organisations, enabling office-bearers of the student newspaper and Campus Radio to keep operating within their terms of appointment, terms which "expired on 28 February 2022" (original wording: office-bearers…"throughout the terms of their appointment which expired on 28 February 2022").

According to Wikipedia's account of the student union's affiliated media^※, after office-bearers' terms expired, Campus Radio, having not registered as a University-affiliated registered society as required by the university, was accordingly asked by the Office of Student Affairs (OSA) to vacate room 302 in Benjamin Franklin Centre on 20 April 2022. The emptying of a recording room brought to a close this student radio station, founded in 1999 and in existence for roughly twenty-three years.

On the cause of Campus Radio ceasing operations, this article, in keeping with its red lines, juxtaposes only the publicly available factual threads and does not develop a political narrative: the university's stated position is that it will not recognise any student union office-bearer or organisation that has not independently registered under the Companies Ordinance or the Societies Ordinance and operated under an approved constitution (per the official statement from the Communications and Public Relations Office); Campus Radio, for its part, exited its original room and institutional standing through its choice not to register as an affiliated society. The two threads are set side by side, without a verdict rendered. The full background of the 2021 student-union continuity dispute is not addressed in this module.

The close of a lineage. From the 1999 constitutional clause pledging to "strive to obtain a terrestrial broadcasting licence," to the 2013 move to the third floor of Benjamin Franklin Centre, to the 2022 emptying of room 302 — CUHK Campus Radio's "sound lineage" ran for roughly twenty-three years. It never did obtain that wireless broadcasting licence, but it left behind, on YouTube, an archive of Council meetings and Judicial Committee hearings. Where the print-media article records a history of publishing set down in black and white, this article records this "sound" side of campus memory — one that is easy to lose, yet just as much a part of it.

Related reading: The Lineage of CUHK Student Media: From The Chinese University Student Press to U-Beat, CUHK Campus Wild History: The Beacon Tower, the Goddess of Democracy, and the Student Publication Controversies.

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