Reading O-Camp Culture: The "Big O" Tradition, "Group Parents," and Years of Controversy

A CUHK first-year student may hear more Cantonese in the first week of term than in three years of secondary school combined: Big O, Small O, Dark O, "group dad," "group mum," Fm, Dem beat, "joining a cabinet," "chatting up a cabinet," "cabinet-versus-cabinet contests," "old ghosts"... This slang did not appear at random — it maps onto an entire hidden structure of who leads whom, who is chosen, and who pays. This piece does not retell the activity flow or the timeline of controversies around orientation camps (see 〈The Complete Orientation Camp Archive〉for that); instead it dissects O-Camp as a student subculture along two lines — terminology and organisational hierarchy: where the slang comes from, how one "joins a cabinet," who pays, and how the controversy over game content has been framed in public discourse. Community conventions here are cited item by item and fall within the domain of student self-governance; named living individuals are not identified, and unsourced negative material naming individuals is not included.

One-line conclusion: according to CUHK student media and publicly available university materials, the student subculture around Chinese University of Hong Kong's O-Camp is sustained jointly by a dual-track "Big O / Small O" system, a four-tier "cabinet" structure, and a self-funded "group parent" economy, while the controversy over the scope of its games has, since 2002, long been framed in public discourse as a matter of "obscenity."

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# I. How O-Camp Slang Grew

# "Big O, Small O, Dark O": how many kinds of orientation camp are there really

A CUHK first-year's summer is often carved into several segments, each corresponding to camps run by a different organiser. According to uFinance's rundown of O-Camp terminology^※, these camps have conventional names tied to which level organises them:

The first three are formal camps arranged in descending scale, and a first-year typically attends the college's Big O first, then the department's Small O — the institutional roots of this "dual-track orientation" (colleges handle whole-person development, departments handle the discipline), and how the nine colleges differ from one another, have already been unpacked in 〈A Study of Orientation Differences Across the Nine Colleges〉and are not repeated here. What is worth flagging on its own is "Dark O": it refers to an orientation camp organised privately without formal approval from the student union or the university. The very existence of this term shows that orientation camps at CUHK have always required "approval" — wherever there is a formal process, there is a grey area for bypassing it; and the university's recent tightening of approval procedures and mandatory training (see the Complete Archive) targets precisely this kind of unsupervised activity.

# "Group dad, group mum, group kids": a borrowed family

The most central cluster of O-Camp slang packages the leader-follower relationship as a family relationship. According to uFinance's terminology explainer^※, a "group dad" is "a Year 2 or above male student responsible for leading the group and setting the mood," a "group mum" is a female student of the same seniority, and "group kids" — with the English abbreviation Fm (Freshmen) noted in parentheses — "means the students entering university; once they join the ocamp they are the group kids." The leaders are not called "group leaders" but "dad" and "mum"; the led are not called "group members" but "sons" and "daughters." This set of quasi-kinship terms elevates an organisational relationship lasting only a few days into a family imaginary carrying emotional obligation, in one step.

This is not idle rhetoric. Once the label is adopted, obligations follow: "parents" are expected to make gifts for their "kids" by hand, to look after their physical and emotional wellbeing throughout, and to keep "looking after" them after the camp ends. The warmer side of this terminology has already been described in the Complete Archive, but it also plants the ledger that Section III of this piece will tally — when "parents" are expected to give as much as real parents would, the financial and emotional cost falls disproportionately on a handful of senior students. The same terminology system also has "house cap" (House Captain), which, per the same source, refers to a role "responsible for watching over and uniting the whole house" — a coordinator ranking above group parents within a college's Big O.

# Dem beat, running hunts, writing on backs: even actions have their own names

How developed a subculture is can be judged by how many everyday actions it names individually. According to uFinance's terminology explainer^※, several recurring collective actions at orientation camps each have their own name: "Dem beat" is "clapping and stamping while shouting chants"; "running hunt" is "running to checkpoints in different parts of Hong Kong to complete tasks"; "fire" (campfire) is "dancing around a fire"; and "writing on the back" refers to writing farewell messages on group members' backs after the activity. These terms compress a set of embodied rituals into two or three characters of slang, and once a first-year learns to use them, they have effectively received a pass into the circle.

Of these, Dem beat is the only one that has "exported" itself to universities across Hong Kong and has its own independently documented entry as a performance form originating at CUHK. Its origins, its divergence from the University of Hong Kong's Dem cheer, and the 2009 protests it triggered over noise have already been detailed in the Complete Archive; this piece only emphasises one point: Dem beat appears both at orientation camps and at recruitment events because it serves two purposes at once — building cohesion internally, and showing incoming students that a given student organisation is "worth joining." That leads to the other half of the slang: the vocabulary of "cabinets."

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# II. The Four-Tier Structure of the "Cabinet": From the Central Student Union to a Single Interest Society

# Why orientation camps are always recruiting for a "cabinet"

To understand orientation camps, one first has to understand the organisational ecosystem they serve. According to the CUHK Office of Student Affairs (OSA) "Student Organizations" page^※, student organisations officially recognised by CUHK fall into three broad categories: Interest Clubs, Faculty / Department / Programme Societies, and College Student Unions. Add the university-wide Hong Kong Chinese University Students' Union on top, and this forms a four-tier structure running from the centre to the grassroots:

According to the same official page, registration and renewal for department-type societies "is handled directly by the respective faculty / department / programme office," and newly formed organisations must go through a six-month pilot run period before gaining formal affiliated status. This tiering is not administrative decoration: each tier has its own "cabinet" (executive committee), and each tier's cabinet depends on orientation camps to present itself to incoming students and recruit the next cohort. Structurally, the orientation camp is this four-tier organisational ecosystem's annual "recruitment mobilisation" — while first-years are being looked after by their group parents at camp, they are also being watched and invited to "join a cabinet."

# The path to a cabinet: chatting up a cabinet, consultation sessions, and that six-to-ten-hour grilling

"Joining a cabinet" — taking on an executive role in a student organisation — is a marker of deep involvement in campus life, and also the starting point of an entire process. According to CUHK Student Press's "The Many Faces of a Cabinet"^※, the birth of a cabinet broadly runs through the stages "chatting up a cabinet → forming a cabinet → publicity → consultation → election": "chatting up a cabinet" is the stage in which "students interested in serving as the next cohort's executives gather to discuss the society's future direction and goals"; toward the end, existing members and "old ghosts" (former executives who have already stepped down) put the incoming cabinet through consultation.

The consultation session is the most exhausting stage of the whole process of joining a cabinet. According to the same student-press article, consultation "usually starts at 7pm and lasts anywhere from 6 to 10 hours," with some running "until the next morning"; the old ghosts question the incoming cabinet in detail on its vision, the organisation's name, and activity specifics. The author divides the old ghosts' questions into two types — "questions about vision" and "nitpicking questions" — and criticises some old ghosts for using the consultation as cover to "hard-sell their own way of thinking." Only after surviving such an all-night interrogation without falling apart, and then winning more than half the vote in the election, does a cabinet count as having truly "joined." How high this bar is set says something about how a "cabinet" post at CUHK is by no means a nominal club title.

# A glossary of "cabinet" slang

The density of vocabulary that has grown up around "cabinet" rivals that of the orientation camp itself. Drawing on CUHK Student Press's "The Many Faces of a Cabinet"^※ for definitions:

This table is itself a small sociological sample: a subculture that coins separate terms for "too idle a cabinet" ("slack cabinet") and "too busy a cabinet" ("chur cabinet") is telling you that "degree of commitment" is the dimension this circle cares about most. The student-press author's conclusion lands in the same place — "whether a cabinet is run well or not doesn't come down to whether it's slack or chur, but to whether its members actually care." From meeting one's "group kids" at orientation camp, to being invited a few months later to chat up a cabinet, to joining one, to stepping down a year later and becoming an old ghost who then consults the next cohort — this is a complete cycle of subcultural reproduction; the orientation camp is simply the first entry point this cycle opens to first-years.

# "Old ghosts": the memory gatekeepers of the subculture

Of all the cabinet terminology, "old ghost" is the most telling. It refers to a former executive who has already stepped down and left the organisation — someone who, in theory, is no longer part of it, yet who holds real scrutiny power over the incoming cabinet at the consultation session. According to CUHK Student Press's "The Many Faces of a Cabinet"^※, during consultation, old ghosts do not merely ask about vision but also "hard-sell their own way of thinking"; the author sorts their questions into "vision-type" and "nitpicking-type," the latter amounting to needless obstruction. Why does someone who has already left hold so much weight? The answer lies in how the subculture operates: old ghosts are this culture's "memory gatekeepers" — they decide which traditions get carried on and which innovations get rejected.

This also explains the second chronic problem the student-press author identifies: "blind imitation," meaning "running the same three or four activities year after year" without independent thought. When every cohort's cabinet has to clear the old-ghost hurdle, and old ghosts tend to use their own past experience as the yardstick, innovation is structurally disadvantaged and tradition reproduces itself. The songs, games, and chants that get passed down "generation after generation" at orientation camps are products of this same memory-gatekeeping mechanism — it guarantees the subculture's stable continuity, while also building in resistance to change. The Complete Archive notes that "the greatest resistance to changing tradition comes from organising-committee members who themselves once enjoyed the same kind of game" — this and the old-ghost mechanism described here are two facets of the same phenomenon: those who have been through a cabinet are both the culture's inheritors and the defenders of its limits.

The institutional history of student organisations and more serious disputes over cabinet affairs (elections, recall votes, defunct cabinets, cabinet finances) are a separate topic; see 〈Student Union and Hall Resident Association Disputes〉and 〈A History of Student Movements and Student Organisations〉. This piece deals only with terminology and structure, and does not go into individual cases.

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# III. The Hidden Economy of Group Parents: A Bill No First-Year Ever Tallies

# Why group parents pay roughly double what first-years pay

The warm-hearted narrative around orientation camps rarely does the arithmetic. But according to CUHK Student Press's "How Much Do Group Parents Pay, and a Note on Head Group Leader Camp Fees"^※, the camp fee group parents pay out of pocket is, across the board, roughly double what first-years pay. Taking the figures the article cites as an example (basis: the camp fees payable by group parents for each camp as recorded in that article; the year of the statistics is as given in the original):

By comparison, first-years' camp fees mostly fall in the HK$700–750 range. According to the article, group parents' fees run "double" — a senior student volunteering to come back and "look after the kids" first has to pay a doubled entry fee. The article does not itemise where this gap comes from for every single camp, but it does point to a structural reason: part of the camp's shared overhead is, by default, expected to be borne at the group-parent tier.

# Head group leader: a role that can cost as much as fifteen thousand out of pocket

The higher the tier, the more exaggerated the out-of-pocket sums become. According to the same student-press article, the "head group leader" (the most senior organiser coordinating an entire camp) spends far more than an ordinary group parent: the article mentions that "last year Wu Yee Sun College's head group leader paid HK$2,000; last year UCBA's head group leader personally spent HK$15,000 on the O-Camp and the BA Festival." Beyond the camp fee, the head group leader also faces a string of "social-pressure" expenses: being expected to dye their hair, which "usually runs into several hundred dollars"; buying accessories and clothing, which is "also several thousand dollars"; and treating group members to meals and late-night food — according to the article, "one such treat alone runs several thousand dollars" — often for no reason other than "since other groups have treated their members to meals, one feels one should too."

The author is explicit in criticism, arguing that these costs "should really be split among everyone, and there is no reason group parents should have to pay such an especially high camp fee," and worries that the high cost "will deter quite a few students who would otherwise be keen to take part in O-Camp." This is the economic price of the quasi-kinship terminology: once "parents" are expected to spend like real parents, the threshold for orientation camp quietly shifts from "are you willing to give your time" to "can you afford it." A warm vocabulary meant to build togetherness shows its exclusionary side here.

It is worth noting that, according to the article, many of these expenses are not strictly required by the activity itself but are products of "social pressure" — "since other groups have treated their members to meals, one feels one should too." In other words, there is a hidden one-upmanship among group parents: if another group has treated its members, not doing so yourself makes it look like you don't care enough about your "kids." This lateral pressure keeps pushing individual spending upward, and small, hard-to-tally items from City Hunt, room games, and yum cha "are hard to calculate precisely one by one, but add up to a large sum." No rule states in writing that group parents must spend this money, but a cultural expectation that "parents ought to dote on their kids" makes the option of not spending effectively unavailable. This is the subculture's subtlest form of coercion: it operates not through regulation but through a role script everyone tacitly accepts — once you take on the label "group dad" or "group mum," you have implicitly accepted the whole spending script that comes with it.

The figures above are all drawn from a single student-media compilation, are individual figures for a specific year and specific camps, and have not been independently cross-verified against other sources; differences by college, department, and cohort are considerable, and no conclusion about the overall cost level of CUHK orientation camps should be drawn from these numbers alone. Credibility: single source.

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# IV. Why "Very Wild, Very Deranged" Is Treated as a Bonding Technique

# How organisers themselves explain the seemingly pointless bits

Outsiders looking at orientation camps often ask "what's the point of all this." Interestingly, organisers do not usually deny that it's "pointless" — instead, they treat the pointlessness itself as the point. According to CUHK Student Press's "The Legend of Ocamp (Part 1)"^※, an interviewed New Asia camp head said plainly that "late-night chats and stargazing, while not educational, are what best let first-years form bonds"; a Wu Yee Sun College camp head put it more directly — "a college's strongest sense of cohesion comes from experiences first-years share, and those usually come from experiences that are very wild, very deranged — for example being pushed into the water at the campfire, or late-night room games; it's these deranged experiences that are the best moments for building cohesion."

This passage is a key to understanding orientation-camp subculture: "very wild, very deranged" is not a side effect of losing control — it is a bonding method organisers pursue deliberately. In their understanding, formal coursework cannot give students a sense of belonging, but the irrational, collectively participated, mildly confrontational absurd moments can — being pushed into water, the wins and losses of room games, an all-night chat with no sleep. The more "over the top" the shared experience, the stronger the in-group identity. This logic is internally coherent, yet it also builds in a dangerous slope.

# From "bonding" to "crossing the line" is only a hair's breadth

Once "extreme experience" is set as the source of cohesion, boundaries become very hard for the group to self-regulate — this is precisely the structural root of the controversy timeline covered in the Complete Archive. When "the more deranged, the more united" becomes a default shared by organisers, the internal brake that judges whether a given game "has gone too far" tends to fail — because within this value system, "too far" is nearly synonymous with "effective." The game-content controversies recorded across the years in the Complete Archive, the 2019 Engineering O-Camp criminal case, and the 2023 territory-wide wave of coverage and Legislative Council discussion can all be seen as points where this slope reached the ground in different years; this piece does not repeat that timeline, and only adds the motivational structure on the organisers' side — the seeds of controversy are often planted right inside "the moment of strongest cohesion."

It is worth stressing that "very wild, very deranged" and "crossing the line" are not the same thing: the overwhelming majority of orientation-camp segments stay at the level of harmless horseplay — being pushed into water, all-night chats. But once a culture legitimises "going over the top" as a bonding method, it lacks a clear internal standard for distinguishing "harmless wildness" from "boundary-crossing excess" — and this is also the deeper reason the university has, in recent years, chosen to intervene with external lines of defence such as mandatory training, anti-harassment ambassadors, and committee approval (institutional detail in the Complete Archive).

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# V. How the Controversy Has Been Framed in Public Discourse

# "The obscenity storm": a recurring media label

The same games that are called "deranged" on campus become "obscene" once they hit the newspapers. Since the 2002 "New Asia sauna" incident at Shaw College, the controversy over game content at CUHK's — and Hong Kong's universities' — orientation camps has long been framed by mainstream media as a matter of "obscenity": coverage has focused on the sensational details of individual over-the-top games, with moral condemnation as the dominant register. This framing effectively directs public attention toward "how can students be so shameless," while asking less often about the structural causes behind the controversy.

A different reading comes from academia. According to Ming Pao Weekly's "Rethinking the O Camp Obscenity Storm"^※, Sonia Wong, a gender-studies lecturer at CUHK, has proposed placing "sexually suggestive games" back within the larger gap in education. She points out that when "society lacks space for a positive discussion of sex and desire, and secondary and primary schools have no gender-mainstreaming sex education," then the seeming openness of "sexually suggestive games" at orientation camps "is in fact a negative eruption." In her analysis, games with poorly calibrated content look more like a symptom than the underlying disease itself.

# Symptom or disease: where the two diagnoses diverge

Placed side by side, the two frameworks' divergence becomes clear. The "obscenity" framework locates the problem in students' moral character and prescribes stricter condemnation and punishment; the "education gap" framework locates the problem in society's long-standing absence of sex education and prescribes filling that gap with positive, systematic sex/gender education. The former asks young people to "restrain themselves"; the latter asks "why did they only learn to express themselves this way." According to the article, Wong criticises public discussion for suffering from "excessive condemnation with no constructive follow-up," and argues for confronting the flaws in the education system rather than stopping at moral criticism.

This archive does not endorse either diagnosis; it only records that two parallel explanatory frameworks genuinely exist within this public discussion. They point toward two quite different directions for reform — one toward stronger external control, the other toward more fundamental education reform. Understanding the O-Camp controversy requires looking not only at how far the games themselves went, but also at which language society uses to talk about them — because choosing a framework is itself already choosing a direction for "solving" it.

The scholarly views above are drawn from a news interview and represent personal analysis rather than a settled conclusion; for the specific years and events involved (2002, 2023, etc.) and the various parties' positions, see the multi-source juxtaposition in 〈The Complete Orientation Camp Archive〉. This section presents only the framing divergence in public discussion and does not adjudicate it. Credibility: multiple sources corroborate.

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# VI. Three Layers Behind One Set of Slang

Taken together, the five sections on terminology, hierarchy, economics, bonding, and public discourse show that this student subculture around CUHK's O-Camp is really built from three overlapping structures:

• A linguistic structure — Big O, Small O, Dark O; group dad, group mum, group kids; joining a cabinet, stepping down, cabinet-versus-cabinet contests — a self-contained slang system that functions both as an in-group pass and as a way of repackaging a three-to-five-day organisational relationship into family and kinship terms;
• An organisational structure — the central student union, college student unions, department societies, and interest clubs form a four-tier "cabinet" system, each tier recruiting annually through orientation camps, forming a reproduction chain of "join a camp → chat up a cabinet → join a cabinet → step down → consult the next cohort as an old ghost";
• An economic and value structure — group parents self-funding a doubled camp fee, head group leaders potentially spending tens of thousands out of pocket, concentrating the cost of cohesion on a small number of people; and a default value of "the more deranged, the more united" that plants a structural slope toward controversy over game content.

These three structures interlock, and each carries its own tension: the flip side of warm kinship terms is economic exclusion; the flip side of a bonding technique is the risk of crossing a line; and what is "deranged" on campus becomes "obscene" once it leaves campus. This archive records only the semantics, structure, and various parties' statements about this subculture, and does not render a verdict for any side.

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# Further Reading

• The Complete Orientation Camp Archive: Traditional Rituals, Organisational Structure, and Years of Controversy
• A Study of Orientation Differences Across the Nine Colleges: Four-College Joint Sessions, the Three-Hundred-Student College, and the Divide Over Mandatory Shared Meals
• Student Union and Hall Resident Association Disputes
• A History of Student Movements and Student Organisations

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