Student Organisation Structure Briefing: The Central Jong, the Nine College Student Unions, and the Ecosystem of “Going On-Jong”

# Student Organisation Structures: The Central Union, the Nine College Student Unions, and the Ecosystem of “Going On-Jong”

A ballot paper from the Council, a “consultation” tug-of-war that drags on until dawn, a sigh of “broken jong”—in the mountain city of CUHK, a “jong” has never been merely a handful of people running activities. The election disputes, opaque finances involving union fees, and out-of-bounds hall association incidents that the rest of this volume recounts all unfold within a single framework of student organisations. This article offers no commentary and traces no disputes; it simply lays out the tiers, electoral mechanisms, and the terminology of “going on-jong” (上莊) to serve as a background index for what follows. Every institutional fact is individually sourced. All living individuals are referred to by title; organisation and publication names are recorded faithfully according to the sources.

This is the background briefing card for the “Student Union & Hall Association Disputes” module, drafted specifically to extract the most relevant structures and terminology for “internal governance disputes” and to add the layer of the Hall Associations. For a comprehensive introduction to residence and college life, see 21-residence-college-life/residence-and-hall-life.md. All living individuals are referred to by title; organisation and publication names are recorded faithfully according to the sources.

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# I. Four Tiers + One Media Strand: The Full Picture

The thing that most readily tangles people up when discussing student organisations at CUHK is simply that “there are too many tiers.” An undergraduate at CUHK may simultaneously be a member of the university-wide student union, a member of a college student union, a member of a departmental society, and—if living in a hall—a member of a hall association. If they then “go on-jong,” their titles can stack up three or four deep. The picture becomes clear if you break it down into four tiers plus one media strand:

A key distinction (repeatedly used later on): The statutory media bodies under the Student Union are the CUHK Student Press and Campus Radio; in contrast, U-Beat and Varsity are teaching practicum publications of the School of Journalism and Communication, where students complete the full editorial workflow under faculty supervision, per the official introduction of U-Beat^※, and are not under the Student Union. The two are frequently conflated; this volume distinguishes them accordingly.

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# II. The Central Jong: The “Three-Power” Structure of CUSU

The “Central Jong” is the largest and most closely watched “jong” at CUHK. It adopts a design resembling a “separation of three powers,” with standing and non-standing organs. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry for the Student Union of CUHK^※, its standing organs are as follows:

# 2.1 The Council: Legislation and Oversight

The Council is the highest legislative, oversight, and representative body of the Student Union, responsible for regulating affiliated organisations, legislating, and exercising oversight and checks on the Executive Committee. It is composed of representatives dispatched by the college student unions—according to a CUSP feature on the Council^※, these representatives are divided into “New Representatives” (college-level) and “Central Representatives” (CUSU-level), elected through the annual grand elections of each college. This design, whereby colleges dispatch representatives to the centre, echoes the collegiate-federal tradition from CUHK’s founding.

# 2.2 The Executive Committee (ExCo): Administration and External Representation

The Executive Committee is the highest administrative organ of the Student Union, representing the Union externally. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry, the ExCo consists of roughly 10 to 15 members, who must come from no fewer than two-thirds of the constituent colleges, and is elected by universal suffrage of all undergraduates. Each term’s ExCo runs for election under the name of a “cabinet”—this is precisely what “going on-jong” refers to at the central level: a group of students forms a cabinet, adopts a jong name (such as past ones like “Shuoye” or “Qiuhao”), campaigns jointly, and governs for a year.

# 2.3 The Judicial Committee: Adjudication and Interpretation—Why Was It Created?

The Judicial Committee is the independent highest judicial organ of the Student Union. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry, it was established in 2017, responsible for interpreting the constitution and adjudicating internal disputes, operating independently of the Council and the ExCo. Judicial Committee members are selected by a nomination committee, confirmed by the Council, and appointed by the President of the Union. The types of cases it handles encompass trials of first instance, appeals, judicial reviews, and constitutional interpretation—the last category is further divided into a “non-litigious form” (clarifying questions for student organisations, with no disputing parties) and a “litigious form” (when multiple parties dispute the meaning of the same constitutional provision).

Its creation did not arise in a vacuum but to resolve a recurrent and intractable problem: disputes over the allocation of resources (particularly society rooms) to affiliated organisations. According to a CUSP article introducing the structure of the Student Union^※, the society rooms available to affiliated organisations were originally distributed across Benjamin Franklin Centre and John Fulton Centre, though the specific timing and method of the original allocation could no longer be verified. Later, with the renovation of Benjamin Franklin Centre and the construction of a new student activity centre at Chung Chi’s Lee Wai Chun Building, society rooms had to be reallocated. Per that article and related collations, as early as 2000 (legislated by the 29th Council, implemented by the 30th), the Bylaw on the Allocation of Resources to Affiliated Societies and the Bylaw on the Affiliated Societies Resource Allocation Committee were enacted, stipulating that those dissatisfied with allocation results could appeal to the Council. After the allocation results were announced that summer, multiple societies were dissatisfied and lodged appeals. The Council handled four appeal cases: two were upheld, two were dismissed. Some societies remained unsatisfied, and the Council subsequently convened a joint meeting to address the matter but was unable to alter the outcome. The Resource Allocation Committee ultimately completed the allocation only after holding a second distribution meeting in December of the same year.

This society room allocation controversy in 2000 brought the question of “to whom should an affiliated society turn for redress if it disagrees with a resource allocation decision” squarely onto the table—at the time, they could only rely on the Council’s ad hoc handling and post-hoc remedial joint meetings, lacking a standing judicial mechanism. This forms part of the institutional backdrop for the Judicial Committee’s establishment in 2017: according to that article, in its first year, the committee’s Sub-Group Committee and Sub-Group Resource Allocation Committee immediately faced multiple judicial review cases brought by affiliated organisations, suggesting that “litigation triggered by resource allocation” was not a one-off event but a structural phenomenon occurring over years when the system lacked a mechanism of final adjudication.

Reliability assessment: Partially corroborated. The Judicial Committee's founding year and functional categories are drawn from the Chinese Wikipedia entry and compiled internal union documents. The specific figures and year of the 2000 allocation controversy—"four appeal cases, two upheld, two dismissed"—are collated from a CUSP structural introduction article; this is a single source, and readers are advised to verify against the Council meeting minutes of that year.

# 2.4 Non-Standing Organs: Referendums, General Assemblies, Joint Meetings

• Referendum: According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry, this is the sole procedure through which all ordinary members exercise the powers of election, initiative, and recall, representing the Student Union’s highest form of resolution.
• General Assembly: The highest authority apart from referendums. Per the Chinese Wikipedia entry, its quorum is one-tenth of all ordinary members (given the membership size, roughly 1,600 people).
• Joint Meeting: Composed of members from the Council, ExCo, Student Press, and Campus Radio. Per the Chinese Wikipedia entry, it has roughly 40 members and coordinates the daily operations of the various organs.

Regarding membership, full-time undergraduates on the Shatin main campus are ex-officio ordinary members, according to the Chinese Wikipedia entry. The Student Union is established under The Chinese University of Hong Kong Ordinance, making it legally part of the University—an “intra-institutional status” that later became a legal focal point in the controversies over union fee collection and suspension (see details in union-finances-and-transparency.md).

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# III. College Student Unions: Nine Colleges, Each with Its Own “Jong”

CUHK operates a collegiate system; undergraduates, in addition to belonging to a faculty for teaching purposes, are also affiliated with a college for whole-person education and residence. Each college has its own student union, which organises welfare, orientation programmes, cultural festivals, and inter-collegiate affairs at the college level, and sends representatives to the central Council, forming a “two-tier” structure with the central Student Union.

CUHK currently has nine colleges, falling into three groups:

• The three founding colleges: New Asia (1949), Chung Chi (1951), and United (1956). These are larger and have deeply rooted student union traditions; the Chung Chi College Student Union, in particular, has a very long history.
• Shaw College: Established in 1986, the fourth college.
• The five new colleges: Morningside, S.H. Ho, C.W. Chu, Wu Yee Sun, and Lee Woo Sing. Founded sequentially between 2006 and 2007, these are mostly small-scale residential colleges with a “fully residential and communal dining” model. Their student unions are smaller in scale, with close-knit memberships.

College student unions and the central Student Union are not in a superior-subordinate relationship but are linked federally through the dispatch of representatives. This is crucial for understanding the election and suspension disputes later in this volume: when the Central Jong falls vacant, the college jongs can still operate independently, and vice versa.

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# IV. Departmental Societies and Hall Associations: The Two Tiers Closest to Daily Life

# 4.1 Departmental/Faculty Societies

Each School and Department generally has a “Society” or “Association,” organising academic, social, and welfare activities for its students. The faculty level coordinates cross-departmental activities, while the departmental level handles orientation, the sharing of past papers, academic talks, camps, and graduation dinners. Departmental societies are also an important arena for the culture of “going on-jong,” with a new cabinet elected each year.

# 4.2 Hall Associations

Hall Associations are student organisations at the hall level, responsible for welfare, activities, and hall orientation within their respective residences. They exhibit two frequently discussed characteristics:

• “Guaranteed Hall Stay”: According to a U-Beat report on the hostel place system^※, members of a Hall Association are often guaranteed a hostel place. This directly links Hall Associations with the allocation of hostel places (the residential score system) (see details in hall-associations-and-ocamp-incidents.md).
• Hall Orientation: In addition to the college “Big O” and departmental “Small O,” halls also run their own orientation programmes, organised by the Hall Association, which constitute the “hall orientation” segment. In the orientation controversies over the years, college O, departmental O, and hall O have all been implicated.

The Hall Association is a newly added layer in this volume—the organisational overview in Module 07 took the Student Union / College Unions / Departmental Societies / Clubs as its main axis. Since this volume needs to address “Hall Association / Orientation-related transgressions,” the Hall Association is listed here separately.

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# V. Why a “Two-Tier” Structure?—A Prehistory of Federal and Centralising Tensions

The most distinctive feature of CUHK’s student organisation is its two tiers: the university-wide tier (Central Jong) and the college tier (College Jong), which are not subordinate to one another but connected by “sending representatives.” This structure is not organic but the product of a historical tug-of-war—understanding it is key to grasping the “Central vs. College” tensions that recur throughout the following chapters.

According to a CUSP feature on the Council^※: when CUHK was founded in 1963, it adopted a collegiate federation system, with the three founding colleges each having an independent student union and power decentralised among them. However, the feature notes that in 1976, the British Hong Kong government amended The Chinese University of Hong Kong Ordinance, steering CUHK toward a model of unitary centralisation. This institutional shift from “federation” to “centralisation” left a lasting echo in the student organisation sphere: the central Student Union gained university-wide representative status, but the tradition of college student unions did not disappear. The colleges persisted in the federal imagination of “sending representatives to the centre and standing on an equal footing with it.”

This gave rise to today’s arrangement:

• The Central Jong: Represents the whole university, voices external stances, and coordinates university-wide affairs;
• The College Jong: Safeguards the individual college’s own welfare, orientation programmes, and traditions, and imposes checks on the centre through the Council;
• Their Relationship: Not a “superior-to-subordinate” one, but that of “federal members versus the federal centre.” Per the CUSP feature, the Council Chair explicitly stressed that colleges should have the “ability to stop” inappropriate actions by the centre, “especially the part about representing CUHK externally.”

This prehistory explains the origins of two key tensions in this volume: first, the boundary tug-of-war between the Council (where college representatives sit) and the ExCo (the central administration) in central-union-elections-disputes.md; second, the financial and organisational independence seen when the “Central Jong falls vacant or suspends operations, yet the College Jongs continue to operate independently” in union-finances-and-transparency.md. The two-tier structure is the underlying terrain for all internal disputes within CUHK’s student organisations.

Reliability assessment: Corroborated. The facts that CUHK adopted a federal system in 1963 and shifted toward centralisation via a 1976 ordinance amendment are drawn from the CUSP feature and general university history compilations. Readers should consult the original text of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Ordinance for specific provisions and dates.

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# VI. The Media Strand: Two Statutory Student Media Channels

The Student Union has two statutory media channels under its purview, whose content is subject to oversight by the General Assembly:

# 6.1 CUHK Student Press (CUSP)

According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry, the CUHK Student Press is published by the CUHK Student Press Publication Committee under the Student Union. Its origins can be traced back to a joint publication of the three founding colleges’ student newspapers at the end of 1967. The formal CUHK Student Press joint publication began at the end of 1969 and adopted its current name in 1971, with the establishment of the Student Union. In 1975, the Press became independent from the Executive Committee. A directly elected three-member cabinet, comprising the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editors, is chosen by referendum. This mechanism of “independent editorial board autonomy” is the institutional root of the perennial tension between “editorial independence vs. internal oversight” that surfaced during subsequent content controversies—the 2007 “erotic supplement” incident being a prime example (see central-union-elections-disputes.md and our archive’s 15-campus-lore/student-media-and-press-freedom.md).

# 6.2 Campus Radio

According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry, Campus Radio is operated by the Campus Radio Editorial Committee. Established in 1999, it produces campus broadcast programming and is also one of the Student Union’s statutory media bodies.

The Executive Committee, the Council, and the “Press and Radio” are sometimes collectively referred to as the Student Union’s “Three Central Jongs” (this is colloquial/student-media usage); this volume notes when it employs this term.

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# VII. A Mini-Glossary of “Jong Talk”: Reading the “Jargon” in What Follows

A set of “jong talk”—Cantonese-inflected student organisation jargon—will appear repeatedly in the subsequent articles. Based on a collation of Hong Kong university student unions and the culture of “going on-jong”^※ and CUSP descriptions of jong affairs^※, the most common terms are listed here:

This set of terms is not unique to CUHK but is a lingua franca across Hong Kong’s higher education sector. However, due to CUHK’s collegiate system and two-tier student union, the layers of “jongs” are more densely packed than at single-campus institutions. From the next article onwards, we enter the real disputes occurring within this framework.

# 7.1 The Three Recurring Ailments of “Jongs”: An Internal Self-Diagnosis

Does this “jong” framework itself function well? According to a CUSP article entitled “The Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven Things About Jongs”^※, an author who had previously gone on-jong summarised three recurring ailments plaguing student organisations:

1. “Unreasonably lethargic”: Members do the bare minimum to tick boxes, never taking genuine responsibility for the organisation’s ideals, leading to its long-term decline;
2. Blindly following precedent: Plans are copied from the previous term year after year, with a lack of independent thought—"the content and rundown were almost identical to the previous jong’s, save for the dates and the names of the people in charge”;
3. Undue interference by old ghosts / the outgoing jong: During the consultation phase, questions from outgoing jong members (“old ghosts”) sometimes devolve into excessive nitpicking or unreasonable grilling, undermining the decision-making confidence of the incoming members.

The article argues that whether a jong succeeds hinges not on “taking it easy” or “working relentlessly,” but on whether the members genuinely possess “heart”—a sense of purpose, ideals, mutual trust, and innovative thinking. This diagnosis, though a personal commentary, reads in the context of this volume’s disputes as an explanation for why “flopped jongs,” “lethargic jongs,” and “excessive consultation” recur across different eras and different jongs—they are not isolated incidents, but recurring flare-ups of the same structural pathologies affecting different jongs at different times.

Reliability assessment: Single source (a personal commentary article in the Student Press, not a systematic survey). Our archive presents this to offer an internal self-diagnostic perspective. It does not imply that all “jongs” have these problems, nor does it direct any assessment at any specific jong or specific term.

# 7.2 Departmental Societies and Academic Associations: A Layer with Virtually No Centralised Supervision

One institutional gap worth noting is this: CUHK’s departmental societies and academic associations number in the hundreds, yet according to publicly available information, they have no unified oversight body comparable to the Council. The finances and operations of these societies and associations are primarily constrained by the administrative offices of their respective colleges or faculties, along with the inherited conventions within the student organisations themselves, rather than being centrally audited by CUSU or any standing committee. This landscape of “fragmented governance” is one of the institutional backdrops that explains how loopholes, such as the “shell associations used to fraudulently obtain hostel scores” described in §III of hall-associations-and-ocamp-incidents.md, could exist for years with little systematic scrutiny—a vacuum in oversight is always harder to detect than oversight failure.

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# Further Reading

• central-union-elections-disputes.md — Central Jong: Cabinet Elections and Jong Affairs Disputes
• union-finances-and-transparency.md — Union Fee Finances and Opaque Practices
• hall-association-governance-deep-dive.md — Hall Association Governance Deep Dive
• hall-associations-and-ocamp-incidents.md — Hall Associations: Orientation-Related Transgressions
• student-media-press-controversies.md — Student Media Controversies (2007 Erotic Supplement, etc.)
• 21-residence-college-life/residence-and-hall-life.md — Residence, Hall Culture, and College Traditions (a lifestyle perspective)
• 14-student-movements/student-organisations-history.md — A General History of Student Organisations’ Rise and Fall (including the 2021 suspension)

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