A History of Student Social Engagement: The Chinese Language Movement, the New Asia Students' Social Service Group, and Wu Zhi Qiao

The tradition of CUHK students "caring about society" dates back to the founding of the University. This article takes a neutral, fact-based approach, selecting three entries on which consensus exists and which are now settled history: a movement that in 1974 made Chinese an official language; a college social service group founded in 1969 by economics students that went into fishing villages to build roads and run schools; and a volunteer bridge-building programme that turned architecture-department drawings into village footbridges in mainland China and twice won awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects. One fought for rights, one rooted itself in local grassroots communities, one undertook construction work on the mainland — together they sketch the three faces of student social engagement.

A note on editorial policy: To maintain objectivity, this article covers only neutral, low-controversy social engagement. Matters of high political sensitivity or disputed interpretation from the past decade or so of student activism and campus politics are, per this archive's conventions, handled through multi-perspective juxtaposition or as external-link directories — see the student movements / campus governance / campus lore special features (13/14/15). This article offers no narrative and draws no conclusions on those.

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# 1. The Chinese Language Movement: Making Chinese an Official Language (1968–1974)

In the late 1960s, Hong Kong society pushed to have Chinese — the language used by the overwhelming majority of the population — recognised as an official language. CUHK students were part of that push. It is a social movement now settled as a matter of historical record, with limited divergence of views, and can be recounted as neutral fact.

CUHK's role was prominent from the start. A 1968 Chinese-language symposium held at Chung Chi College is regarded as one of the movement's starting points; the Alliance for Making Chinese an Official Language was subsequently formed at CUHK, chaired by a Chung Chi student^※. This was no accident — CUHK was founded in 1963 as Hong Kong's first university to use Chinese as its principal medium of instruction, and its students were correspondingly active in the campaign.

The movement's progress and outcomes follow a clear timeline: the Hong Kong education sector and tertiary students campaigned for Chinese as an official language from 1970; the government established the Working Party to Study the Use of Chinese in Government Proceedings in 1971^※; then in 1974 the government amended the Official Languages Ordinance, establishing that Chinese and English enjoy equal official status^※ — widely regarded as the movement's key achievement. The campaign was one of the significant social movements driven by the academic community in Hong Kong during the 1970s^※, and together with the contemporaneous Diaoyutai movement, formed what later generations would call a high-water mark of student social engagement.

The movement's specific organisation and personalities are equally well documented. According to the Wikipedia entry, the Alliance for Making Chinese an Official Language was chaired by Lam Hung-chau (林鸿筹), a Chung Chi student, and comprised numerous constituent groups coordinating petitions and signature drives^※. The campaign's effectiveness left traces in the numbers: Dr. Wong Mang-fa launched a petition in 1971, collecting 330,000 signatures delivered to Downing Street in London demanding official status for Chinese^※ — the largest display of public sentiment in the movement's history. This was followed by Chung Sze-yuen, who in 1972 became the first legislator to speak in Chinese at a Legislative Council meeting^※ — a symbolic moment that brought Chinese into the proceedings of Hong Kong's highest legislative body and paved the way for the 1974 legislation. The 330,000 signatures and the first Chinese-language speech in LegCo are the two most concrete verifiable facts the movement left behind.

The campaign was not CUHK's alone; it converged with a citywide united front of academic institutions. According to the Baidu Baike entry on the Chinese Movement^※, in September 1970 the Hong Kong Federation of Students announced the formation of an Action Committee for Making Chinese an Official Language, which joined with the Working Committee of All Sectors for Making Chinese an Official Language and the CUHK-launched Alliance to form a united front. The three bodies divided the work and jointly pressured the government. This shows that while CUHK students played the pioneering role at the movement's outset (the 1968 Chung Chi symposium), its eventual success rested on cross-institutional, cross-sector coalition — no single institution could have achieved it alone.

The Chinese Language Movement is an early exemplar of the CUHK student tradition of "caring about society," and its outcome — Chinese attaining official-language status — has long been viewed neutrally by commentators across the strait, making it uncontroversial enough for inclusion here. For a deeper treatment of the movement, see 14-student-movements; for the student-organisation forms it gave rise to and how they evolved over the following decades, see 学生组织发展史.

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# 2. The New Asia Students' Social Service Group: From Village Roads to Charity Schools (from 1969)

If the Chinese Language Movement represents CUHK students reaching "outward" to fight for language rights, the New Asia Students' Social Service Group represents them reaching "downward" to root themselves in the local grassroots — the oldest and best-documented college social service organisation among CUHK's colleges. This orientation has something to do with New Asia College's founding character: according to the Wikipedia entry on New Asia College^※, the college's predecessor, the Asia College of Arts and Commerce, was founded in Hong Kong in 1949 by scholars who had come south from the mainland, including Ch'ien Mu, Tang Chun-i and Chang Pi-chieh. Its first campus consisted of just four classrooms on two rented floors on Kweilin Street in Kowloon — extremely spartan conditions, and most of its students were young refugees who had fled the mainland. A college born of sheltering exiled youth and founded on humanistic ideals naturally found its students, twenty years later, organising a social service group and going into fishing villages and charity schools — in a sense, a direct continuation of the founding spirit.

It was started by an economics student. According to the official history archives of New Asia College^※, the group was founded in 1969 by economics student Edward Kam Wai-pui (甘伟培, Class of 1971), with the core aim of cultivating social awareness among New Asia students through community aid and social engagement.

The group moved quickly from founding to practice: in 1970, it took over a free school in Kowloon City that had been closed for two years over administrative difficulties, providing free education to underprivileged students and organising tutoring classes and fundraising drives^※ — running a school was the organisation's first foothold.

The 1974 work camp at Quarry Bay / Hang Hau fishing village is the group's best-documented operation. According to the archive, the camp was held at "Fisherman Village" in Hang Hau, Sai Kung, where members' main task was to pave a 700-foot pedestrian path along the village's main road — a stretch that had never been surfaced, turning to impassable mud in the rain and causing real inconvenience to the villagers^※. Paving the road with their own hands gave members a firsthand understanding of fisherfolk life, turning social ideals into concrete labour.

The camp was not all work. According to the archive, it also featured talent shows, games, and a visit to the High Island Reservoir; the camp book compiled by members collected Chinese and English songs, recording an atmosphere that balanced service with fellowship^※.

From the Kowloon City free school to road-building at the Hang Hau fishing village, the New Asia Students' Social Service Group exemplifies an alternative mode of 1970s CUHK student social engagement — not petitions and signatures, but direct, hands-on labour in the grassroots. This "learning by doing" orientation stands in contrast to the more politically charged "recognise China, care about society" (認中關社) currents of the same fiery era (see <火红年代的路线之争>), reminding readers that 1970s CUHK student engagement was never monolithic.

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# 3. Wu Zhi Qiao: From CUHK to Footbridges in Rural Mainland China

Student social engagement is not limited to rights campaigns; it also includes long-term, low-controversy service. The most representative such project, with its origins squarely at CUHK, is Wu Zhi Qiao ("Bridge to China").

Its starting point was a genuine tragedy. According to an official report by Xi'an Jiaotong University^※, the village of Maosi in Gansu province, with a population of around 1,500, is split by the Pu River; for years villagers could cross only via a crude log bridge of mud, straw and tree trunks. One rainy day the river surged, and a local child was swept away by the torrent while caught between "going to school and going home"; children slipping and injuring themselves was a near-daily occurrence. According to the report, in 2002, after a joint survey by Xi'an Jiaotong University and CUHK, Professor Ng Yan-kueng (吳恩融) of the CUHK Department of Architecture launched a bridge-building plan, and in July 2005 the first Wu Zhi Qiao bridge was completed in Maosi — built precisely so that the road to school would never again claim a child's life. With the support of Sir David Akers-Jones, Professor Ng and a group of like-minded people named the project 「良桥助学梦成真」(A Bridge Too Far)^※. After the success of that first project, the Wu Zhi Qiao Charitable Foundation was formally established in Hong Kong in 2007, with the aim of enabling university students from Hong Kong and mainland China to personally design and build footbridges and other village facilities for poor remote areas, improving villagers' lives and building a "bridge of hearts" between students from both places and the villagers^※.

In operation, Wu Zhi Qiao encourages students from both sides of the border to volunteer their design and construction skills, using environmentally conscious principles, for remote impoverished villages in mainland China. Its reach is considerable — according to public reports, more than 3,000 young students from Hong Kong and mainland China have served as volunteers since the foundation's inception; its wire-mesh basket bridges, rammed-earth houses and a series of livelihood improvement works have benefited villagers in Gansu, Shaanxi, Yunnan, Sichuan, Anhui and elsewhere^※.

This philosophy of "low-tech, high-science" rural construction brought international recognition to Professor Ng's team. According to a report from ScienceNet^※, Professor Ng's team won the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) annual award twice: first, the "A Bridge Too Far" (Wu Zhi Qiao) bridge project, which received the RIBA International Award in 2006; second, the Maosi Ecological Demonstration Primary School project on the loess plateau of Gansu — construction of the school began in 2002, using natural daylight and ventilation, and local materials such as rammed earth and rubble stone, aiming to provide a comfortable and pleasant learning environment for village children; it likewise received an RIBA award in 2009^※. According to the report, the two projects were "the two lowest-cost of all winning works since the RIBA awards were established in 1966" — serving the poorest villagers at the lowest possible cost being precisely Professor Ng's design philosophy.

The school's specific design is a textbook example of the "low-tech, high-science" idea. According to the Baidu Baike entry on the Maosi Ecological Demonstration Primary School^※, before redevelopment, the village's 200 or so pupils attended classes in cave dwellings or rudimentary single-storey mud houses. The new school divides ten classrooms into five units on two terraces at different levels, giving every classroom maximum daylight and summer ventilation; its form derives from local traditional timber-framed pitched-roof vernacular houses, inheriting their earthquake resistance and allowing villagers to do the construction themselves. The north side of the classrooms is embedded into the terrace to reduce winter heat loss; combined with thick rammed-earth walls, traditional insulated roofing, and double glazing, indoor temperatures remain relatively stable — "warm in winter, cool in summer." The direct construction cost of the new classrooms (materials, labour and equipment) came to only HK$422 per square metre — a figure that quantifies precisely what "serving the poorest villagers at the lowest cost" means in design terms.

# How Big Did It Get: From "24 Bridges in 5 Years" to "Nearly 60 Projects"

Wu Zhi Qiao's scale did not stay fixed; it grew steadily over the years, and two reports published years apart form a comparable timeline. A 2013 China News Service report noted that in the preceding five years, Wu Zhi Qiao had built 24 bridges across six provinces including Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi, Hunan and Chongqing^※; by 2020, according to a Sina News report, the foundation had since its inception organised more than 25 university teams and completed nearly 60 projects, including 52 footbridges, 3 village construction demonstration projects and 3 village activity centres, plus a series of livelihood facility improvements^※. Comparing the two sets of figures, the project map has clearly extended beyond bridge-building itself to longer-cycle rural construction such as whole-village development and activity centres.

Individual volunteer trajectories give the abstract name "Wu Zhi Qiao" a human face. According to the same report, Hong Kong resident Li Tak-wai (李德伟) has participated in Wu Zhi Qiao projects since 2009, helping build nearly 20 bridges over 11 years^※ — one person, by hand, contributing to more than a third of the total projects, a microcosm of the foundation's long-term volunteer base. The largest single undertaking is the village activity centre in Macha village, Gansu: more than 110 student volunteers from mainland China, Hong Kong and overseas, together with nearly 40 villagers, built over five years a 648-square-metre village activity centre^※ — a five-year construction period and 648 square metres showing that some Wu Zhi Qiao projects long ago outgrew the "build a footbridge over the summer" scale, evolving into long-term, companionship-style rural construction.

# Founder Professor Ng Yan-kueng: From Wu Zhi Qiao to "One University One Village"

Wu Zhi Qiao did not emerge from thin air; it was a stage in the ongoing rural-architecture practice of its founder, Professor Ng Yan-kueng. According to the Wikipedia entry on Ng Yan-kueng^※, Ng earned a PhD in architecture from the University of Cambridge, joined the CUHK Department of Architecture in 1999, and is now the Y. S. Liu Professor of Architecture. He launched the bridge-building plan in 2005, completing the first Wu Zhi Qiao bridge in Gansu; founded the Wu Zhi Qiao Charitable Foundation in 2007 and served as its founding chairman until 2013. Beyond Wu Zhi Qiao, in 2006 Ng's team launched the "Yao Xue Xing" project, building schoolhouses for ethnic-minority communities in impoverished mountain areas of Guangxi; in 2014 he assembled the "One University One Village" (一專一村) programme, transplanting Wu Zhi Qiao's "students + professionals + village" model to broader rural-construction fields; and within that programme, the Kwong Ming Village post-disaster reconstruction project won the "World Building of the Year" top honour at the 2017 World Architecture Festival (WAF) in Berlin. Ng himself has accordingly received the RIBA annual award twice (2006, 2009), the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards for Culture Heritage Conservation twice (2009, 2011), and the Hong Kong Red Cross "Hong Kong Humanity Award" in 2010. This genealogy of projects descending from Wu Zhi Qiao shows that CUHK students' rural-construction engagement is no one-off act of charity but part of a rural-construction methodology that has been continuously replicated and scaled over two decades.

Wu Zhi Qiao lets CUHK and other university students apply their professional training (architecture, engineering, environmentally conscious design) to rural construction — a representative case of combining "study" and "service." Its two RIBA annual awards also show that rural-construction practice rooted in the mainland grassroots can win recognition from the international professional architectural establishment, reflecting the long-term, constructive side of CUHK student social engagement.

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# 4. The Organisational Vehicles of Social Engagement

CUHK students' social engagement has mostly operated through student organisations, but also through institutionalised programmes coordinated at the university level:

• The Student Union and college student unions: have historically voiced opinions and organised activities on public issues of education, language and social service. For their structures and workings, see 学生组织架构.
• College social service bodies: college-affiliated groups such as the New Asia Students' Social Service Group, some with histories stretching back decades, centred on local grassroots service (free schools, work camps). The college system's residential and communal-dining traditions are covered separately in 住宿、舍堂文化与书院传统.
• Combining profession with service: such as Wu Zhi Qiao (architecture/engineering) and assorted community service schemes that link disciplinary training to social service.
• Institutionalised platforms at the university level: according to a September 2011 announcement by the CUHK Communications and Public Relations Office^※, the University launched the I·CARE Programme in 2011, with the slogan "Aspiration through reflection; Renewal through civility." Its projects fall into several broad categories: service projects and student-initiated action research, NGO internships, social enterprise and corporate social responsibility, the I·CARE Distinguished Lecture Series and forums, and student mental-wellbeing support. According to the official "About I·CARE" page^※, the programme's motto is 「博思明志，群育新民」 ("broad thinking for clear purpose; communal education for new citizens"), and since the 2016–17 academic year it has been coordinated by the I·CARE Centre for Whole-person Development, with standing programmes including the I·CARE Practitioners Scheme, the anti-poverty service projects, the NGO internship programme, the social enterprise start-up scheme, social service projects and the I·CARE Distinguished Lecture Series. Of these, the NGO internship programme^※ selects non-governmental organisations in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan as partner organisations, offering CUHK students internships of roughly two months — local-track participants experience the human connections at the heart of community work, while those on the mainland and Taiwan tracks, besides deeper community engagement, also sample local culture. Student-initiated or semi-spontaneous rural-construction projects like Wu Zhi Qiao can apply through such schemes for funding and training support.

The three cases differ in era and field, but all were initiated by CUHK teachers and students, and can be compared side by side:

Comparing these three levels of organisational vehicle reveals a structural feature of CUHK student social engagement: a path running from student spontaneity (the initial launches of both the New Asia service group and Wu Zhi Qiao), through semi-spontaneous college-affiliated bodies, to institutionalised university-level platforms (the I·CARE Programme) — a bottom-up trajectory progressively absorbed into institutional support. Students' social concern is first enacted hands-on by individual teachers, students and organisers; the university then consolidates that path into a sustainable institution through funding, training and a dedicated administrative unit.

The geographical radius of the three also widens with the decades: the Chinese Language Movement's target was Hong Kong's own legislative process; the New Asia group's village road ran through a locality of Hang Hau, Sai Kung; Wu Zhi Qiao pushed the service radius into remote villages across multiple mainland provinces — Gansu, Shaanxi, Yunnan, Sichuan, Anhui — attracting more than 3,000 Hong Kong and mainland student volunteers in total. From a local issue to local grassroots service to cross-border rural construction, this traces a geographic arc across more than half a century of CUHK student social engagement.

This article confines itself to factual statements on neutral, low-controversy social engagement. For movements and events of high political sensitivity and widely divergent interpretations, this archive, per its conventions, handles them through multi-perspective juxtaposition or link-only directories, and does not extend its narrative to them here, in order to maintain objectivity.

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# Further Reading

• 中文运动纵深解析 — the complete timeline and multiple perspectives on the Chinese Language Movement
• 火红年代的路线之争 — the more politically coloured "recognise China, care about society" currents contemporary with the New Asia service group
• 学生组织发展史 — how CUHK student organisations have evolved since the 1960s
• 学生组织架构 — the current structure and operations of the Student Union and college student unions
• 住宿、舍堂文化与书院传统 — the college system, communal dining and community life in the colleges

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