Union Dues and the Membership Crisis: HKUSTSU's Deficit, Broken Cabinet Succession, and a Temporary Office

A room of roughly 200 square feet, stacked with megaphones, old clothing, ballot boxes, and a students' union flag with worn edges — this was not the storeroom of some newly founded student society, but around 2023, the actual working space of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Students' Union (HKUSTSU). Office renovations, suspended dues collection, membership attrition, and an annual deficit — several threads intertwine to form a financial and legitimacy crisis that has lasted for years and shows no sign of fundamental relief. This article compiles public figures and direct quotations reported by Sing Tao Daily, Ming Pao, The Collective HK, and others, organised on a timeline, presenting multiple accounts side by side without rendering a verdict.

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# Background: The 2021 Wave of "Severance" (割席) Across Hong Kong's Eight UGC-Funded Universities, and the Dues Question

To understand the circumstances behind HKUSTSU's suspended dues collection, it is necessary first to understand the broader political climate at Hong Kong's higher education institutions around 2021. According to China News Service and multiple other media outlets, in the first half of 2021, CUHK, HKU, CityU, and PolyU each in turn "severed ties" (割席) with their respective students' unions: CUHK was first to act, announcing in February 2021 that remarks made by the students' union's incumbent cabinet and its use of the campus for political messaging could carry legal risk, and that it would suspend dues collection on the union's behalf and require the union to register itself as an independent society or company; HKU followed in April of the same year, citing the union's conduct as having grown "increasingly politicised" in ways that damaged the university's reputation and overall interests; CityU and PolyU subsequently adopted similar measures. This wave of "severance" was a rare instance in the history of student self-governance at Hong Kong's tertiary institutions of multiple universities concentrating similar administrative measures within a short span of time.

HKUST does not appear on this widely reported "severance" list — the four institutions explicitly named in public reporting are CUHK, HKU, CityU, and PolyU; no mainstream outlet has been found to place HKUST in the same batch of "severed" institutions. However, according to The Collective HK, HKUST's administration likewise suspended its dues-collection arrangement "the year before last" (i.e., within roughly the same time window) — except that this decision was not, as at CUHK and HKU, accompanied by a public statement or comparable media attention. The contrast is telling: the same act of suspending dues collection was, at CUHK and HKU, packaged as a formal statement of severance from a "politicised" students' union, accompanied by an explicit statement of political rationale; at HKUST it was comparatively low-key, with no official statement clearly setting out the basis for the decision — the matter surfaced only in passing during an interview with the students' union. This difference between a "quiet suspension" and a "high-profile severance" arguably also reflects HKUSTSU's lower political visibility around 2021 relative to the CUHK and HKU unions — a students' union that is not often thrust into the public spotlight naturally attracts less external attention when its relationship with the administration is adjusted.

By comparison, City University's "severance" path during the same period took a different form, and merits inclusion here. According to HK01, CityU's administration cited not political grounds but "persistently poor financial management," suspending dues collection for the CityU students' union as early as June 2020^※ — nearly a year ahead of the politically framed "severances" at CUHK and HKU. According to a CityU dean of students' circular cited in reporting, the then dean of students had already raised concerns about the union's financial management as early as January 2013, and the union's honorary auditor resigned at the end of 2012 after the union failed to submit financial records for the 2006–2011 fiscal years; according to on.cc, media reports have also covered a former member of the CityU students' union's editorial board being convicted of falsifying accounts in 2004^※, and a HK$304,000 deficit at a 2017 orientation camp. The CityU students' union, for its part, countered that the administration was using administrative procedure to suppress the union's operations — the two sides give conflicting accounts. This comparison suggests that "suspending dues collection" among Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities between 2020 and 2021 had more than one triggering rationale — both the CUHK/HKU style of political statement and the CityU style of financial accountability. Which category HKUST falls into is, based on available material, not addressed in any official explanation; the timing can only be inferred from The Collective HK's report as roughly overlapping with CUHK and HKU.

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# Membership Numbers: A Slide from Nearly Four Thousand to Just over a Thousand

According to a 2023 report by The Collective HK, HKUSTSU's membership fell within three years from a peak of roughly 4,000^※ members to around 1,000. Behind this decline lies a key institutional change: around 2021, the administration stopped collecting union dues on the union's behalf. Previously, union dues had long been collected by the administration as part of tuition or registration, so that nearly all undergraduates automatically became members; once the administration withdrew from this collection process, the union had to recruit members and persuade students to pay dues voluntarily, and the membership base fell accordingly.

According to a March 2024 Ming Pao report, the current cabinet launched an official website with an online payment function as a form of "self-rescue," and membership numbers recovered to around 1,200^※; the then internal vice-president acknowledged: 「不少新生不知学生会存在，认受性今非昔比。」(Many freshmen don't know the students' union exists; its legitimacy is not what it once was.)

This slide in the membership base is not confined to the level of "recruitment difficulty" — it has also fed downward into the electoral system itself. According to 〈One Ballot, One Cabinet: The "Uncontested" Era of HKUSTSU Elections〉, the union constitution's threshold for election — "no fewer than 14% of members voting in favour" — corresponds to an absolute vote count that falls as the membership base shrinks; the threshold that the 2025 and 2026 cabinets needed to clear to be "uncontested" has dropped to roughly 150 to 170 votes — a direct consequence, at the level of electoral legitimacy, of the membership-attrition crisis described in this article.

This shift from "collected on the union's behalf" to "self-paid" amounted, for the union, to a wholesale restructuring of its membership-recruitment logic. Under the "automatic membership" system (whereby all undergraduates automatically became members), the union barely needed to actively cultivate membership relationships — dues were deducted automatically alongside tuition, and membership was a default outcome of enrolment rather than an active choice. Once collection was suspended, the union had to operate like an ordinary civil society, actively soliciting and persuading students to pay dues voluntarily through channels such as its website, social media, and orientation events — for an organisation accustomed to "waiting for members to arrive automatically," this was a fundamental transformation of its operating model, comparable in difficulty to a business shifting from "monopoly supply" to "competing for customers in an open market." The fall in membership from nearly 4,000 to just over a thousand is, to some extent, a direct reflection of the pains of this transition.

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# An Annual Deficit of Over HK$780,000

According to Sing Tao Daily, HKUSTSU recorded a deficit of over HK$780,000 in a certain fiscal year. The most direct cause of this deficit was dues revenue shrinking in step with membership attrition; at the same time, the union still had to maintain the day-to-day operating costs of outward-facing service facilities such as the Print Shop and the Co-op Shop, as well as fixed expenditure items such as affiliated-society subsidies and event budgets — the gap between the two sides of the ledger widened rapidly as a result.

As far as available material shows, public reporting does not disclose the specific fiscal-year range to which this deficit corresponds, nor has the union published a line-item financial report explaining the deficit's causes. This article records the figure as reported by Sing Tao Daily; credibility: single source (the figure currently appears in only one Sing Tao Daily report, with no independent financial documents or cross-verification by a second outlet).

Inferring from the union's revenue-and-expenditure structure, the origins of this deficit are broadly traceable. The union's Council maintains a Finance Committee (FC), responsible for approving the union's overall finances and applications for affiliated-society subsidies; but what the Finance Committee can approve is only "how to allocate existing income" — it cannot create income out of nothing. The union's main external revenue channels are the Print Shop and the Co-op Shop: the former provides printing and photocopying services, the latter sells stationery, snacks, and electronics to members at a discount. Both of these are, in essence, "service" rather than "dues" revenue — limited in scale and highly dependent on campus foot traffic and membership size. As membership fell from several thousand to just over a thousand, dues revenue contracted directly, and the Co-op Shop, as a members-only discount outlet, saw its potential customer base shrink in step — with both dues and revenue lines declining simultaneously, while fixed expenditure items such as affiliated-society subsidies, event budgets, and facility maintenance could not necessarily be cut in equal proportion, the resulting deficit looks close to an inevitable outcome of the revenue-expenditure structure rather than a one-off lapse in any single year.

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# The Office Move: From a Formal "Soc Room" to a 200-Square-Foot Temporary Space

According to The Collective HK, the union's original formal activity room (colloquially known among students as the "Soc Room") entered a state of renovation at one point, and the union was forced to temporarily relocate to a roughly 200-square-foot space in a corner of campus, described as "cluttered and piled with odds and ends"; the article describes the temporary room as containing megaphones, clothing, ballot boxes, and a worn students' union flag, in contrast to the formal image of a "student self-governing body."

According to the report, the administration had originally planned to complete the Soc Room renovation "early next year" so the union could move back to its original location; but within the range of public material this article was able to check, no follow-up report has been found confirming whether the move back was completed as scheduled.

For an organisation like a students' union, whose legitimacy depends on "visibility," the physical space of its office carries symbolic weight no less significant than its practical function. A formal, fixed, prominently located office room is itself a concrete embodiment of the union's "presence": passing students can see the sign, drop in to ask questions, and see posters and notices on the wall — this kind of everyday, informal exposure is precisely the most basic channel for recruiting new members and sustaining organisational visibility. When the office was temporarily relocated, owing to renovation, to a cramped, clutter-filled space in a corner of campus, the union effectively lost both forms of capital — a "formal venue" and a "prominent location" — at once, compounding the difficulties of self-managed dues recruitment into a vicious cycle: fewer members → less revenue → difficulty maintaining a presentable operating space → further reduced visibility → greater difficulty recruiting new members.

Placing HKUST's office-relocation case alongside what happened at other Hong Kong Island students' unions reveals a clearly different character. According to HK01, HKU's administration announced in May 2021^※ that, in addition to suspending dues collection, it would directly take over the venues and facilities belonging to the HKU students' union — that is, reclaiming the union's original physical space in the administration's own name, rather than a temporary relocation for renovation as at HKUST; the HKU union's then cabinet promptly criticised the administration's move as "severance" that undermined mutual trust, saying the takeover of facilities directly affected student interests. By comparison, existing reports characterise HKUSTSU's office relocation as a temporary move arranged by the administration for renovation work, with no report characterising it as a proactive reclamation or punitive takeover by the administration — this difference in character is a piece of background worth noting when understanding the HKUST case: even where the underlying problem is the same — "something went wrong with the union office" — the triggering mechanism and the character of the administration's own account are not consistent across the eight universities, and HKUST's office relocation should not simply be equated with HKU's facilities takeover.

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# Expressive Space Also Narrows: The Democracy Wall and the Big-Character Poster Wall

Running alongside the financial difficulties is a decline in the actual use of the union's traditional spaces for expression. According to The Collective HK, the union's original "Democracy Wall" has been almost entirely unused since a rule requiring 「张贴者须填写姓名及学号」("anyone posting must provide their name and student number") took effect; the "Big-Character Poster Wall" is likewise idle. Both were once traditional grounds for students to voice opinions and post advocacy materials, and under the combined effect of the new rule and a changing political environment, they have gradually fallen out of students' everyday use.

The union's then president summed up this situation in an interview with the words 「在学校眼中，我们从来都没拥有什么」("In the eyes of the school, we have never really owned anything") — this reflects the union side's subjective sense of its access to campus space; no public response from the administration to this characterisation has been found. This article presents the statement, attributed as such, without rendering a verdict.

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# The "Succession Plan": Can Three First-Year Recruits Reverse the Trend?

Facing the difficulty of cabinet succession, according to The Collective HK, the current cabinet added three first-year students to its team as part of a specially designed "Succession Plan" (传承计划) — intended to bring lower-year students into the union's operational core early, to avoid a gap where an entire cabinet graduates with "no one left to take over." The article notes that of the union's ten cabinet members, five are returning members serving another term ("old cabinet members," 老幹事), including the president, who had gone through both the Umbrella Movement and the anti-extradition-bill movement.

This arrangement is, to some extent, a proactive response to the "broken succession" (断庄) crisis: rather than passively waiting for freshmen to form a cabinet on their own, the union intervenes early, using a mentoring approach to shorten the learning curve for incoming members. As far as available material shows, no follow-up report has been found evaluating the actual effectiveness of this succession plan.

The combination of "five old cabinet members, three first-year recruits" itself reflects a structural tension in the union's human resources: on one hand, keeping experienced "returning" (回锅) members at the helm ensures continuity of operations and avoids practical errors caused by a generational gap; on the other, over-reliance on "returning" members also delays the process by which a new generation of students independently takes over full responsibility for cabinet duties — this echoes, to some extent, the "veteran culture" (老鬼文化) logic described in 〈Mosquito Pools, Veterans, and Housing Points: Cabinet-Formation Pressure and Succession Culture in HKUST's Hall Associations〉: sustained involvement by senior members can certainly pass on experience, but if that involvement becomes a routine dependence on "the old guard," it may further erode new students' confidence and motivation to form a cabinet independently, producing a dual effect in which succession and dependency coexist.

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# Reviving Events: Attempts to Rebuild Visibility

According to reports, the current cabinet plans to revive a number of traditional events, including a formal inauguration ceremony, an orientation camp, and a music festival, with the aim of raising the union's on-campus visibility and reconnecting with current students. The then internal vice-president described the present situation as 「另一种方法在学校生存」("a different way of surviving at this school") — a remark that echoes, in the broader interview, a shift in approach "from hard confrontation to pragmatic communication" (for related political background, see Notes on Campus Governance and Institutional Reform^※; this article does not expand beyond its scope here).

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# Comparison with Other Institutions: Is HKUST the "Worst-Off" Case?

Placing HKUSTSU's financial difficulties within the broader picture of Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities, the picture presented by public material is relatively complex. On one hand, as noted above, CUHK, HKU, CityU, and PolyU experienced a more severe "severance" in 2021, accompanied by formal official statements — the unions at these institutions not only likewise faced an interruption of dues income, but some (such as the CUHK union) went on to formally dissolve within less than a year. By comparison, HKUSTSU, while likewise absorbing a sharp drop in dues income and membership attrition, never reached the point of dissolution — this may suggest that HKUSTSU showed relatively greater organisational resilience in responding to the financial crisis, or that it faced relatively less external pressure owing to lower political visibility; the two explanations are not mutually exclusive.

On the other hand, in absolute terms, HKUSTSU's membership base of just over a thousand and its annual deficit of over HK$780,000 reflect a smaller "scale" to begin with, compared with unions such as those at CUHK and HKU, which have a longer history and a membership base traditionally numbering in the tens of thousands — the smaller a union's scale, the more limited the absolute impact of the same proportional membership loss, and the more room it may have for operational adjustments such as cutting spending or moving to a small temporary office. This article notes, based on available material, the limits of this comparative perspective: no authoritative body or academic study has been found to have conducted a systematic, quantitative cross-comparison of the financial health of the eight Hong Kong students' unions; the comparison above is assembled only from scattered news reports, and readers should weigh its inferential force with caution.

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# The Gap in the "Broken Succession" Label: Two Accounts, 2021 and 2024

It is worth noting that the statement of whether HKUSTSU has ever experienced "broken succession" (断庄) has appeared in mutually contradictory versions across reports from different years. According to an HK01 report dated 7 October 2021^※ (the same month HKU and CUHK's students' unions each dissolved in succession), only PolyU still had a students' union operating normally among the eight institutions at that time; 「浸大、城大、科大、教大、岭大都因无学生『接庄』而『断庄』」("Baptist U, City U, HKUST, Ed U, and Lingnan U have all experienced 'broken succession' because no students have come forward to 'take over the cabinet'") — HKUST was explicitly listed among the "broken succession" institutions in this 2021 list. But according to a March 2024 Ming Pao report, the then internal vice-president of the current cabinet, in an interview, described HKUST as "the only one among the eight with unbroken, continuous succession" 「唯一连续不断庄」.

These two statements conflict on their face, but are not entirely irreconcilable: a more plausible reading is that around 2021, HKUSTSU did at one point face difficulty recruiting cabinet members, and possibly a brief vacancy, similar to the pressure of "no one taking over the cabinet" faced by Baptist U, City U, and others in the same period; in the several cabinets that followed (particularly between 2022 and 2024), HKUSTSU successively found new members to take over, maintaining uninterrupted operation, which is what led the 2024 report to describe it as having "unbroken, continuous succession." In other words, the two reports likely each capture a different slice of time within this crisis, rather than genuinely contradicting each other — but as far as available public material shows, no single report has been found giving a complete, year-by-year account of HKUSTSU cabinet recruitment between 2021 and 2024. This article presents the two statements side by side as they stand; credibility: contested — counter-evidence exists (the literal statements conflict; readers should judge for themselves in light of the timeline, and this article does not render a verdict as to which is correct).

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# Attributed Accounts, Side by Side: Multiple Explanations for the Financial Crisis

Regarding the causes of the union's financial and membership crisis, public reporting presents several mutually non-exclusive explanatory angles:

• The union's own account: attributes the main causes to the administration's suspension of dues collection, the pandemic's disruption of activity succession, reduced exposure from the office relocation, and lower student willingness to participate amid a changing political environment;
• A broader observation within Hong Kong's academic community: according to multiple reports and commentary pieces, students' unions at many of Hong Kong's UGC-funded universities have in recent years faced similar membership attrition and financial pressure — a general, cross-institutional structural phenomenon, not a case unique to HKUST;
• The administration's perspective: as far as available public material shows, no formal statement from HKUST's administration has been found setting out the specific basis, timing, or policy considerations behind its decision to suspend dues collection.

This article records, as faithfully as possible, the figures and quotations in existing public reporting, presenting each side's account alongside the others, without rendering an evaluative conclusion on behalf of any party.

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# Related Reading

• 〈One Ballot, One Cabinet: The "Uncontested" Era of HKUSTSU Elections〉 — how the shrinking membership base fed downward into the election threshold and the "uncontested" system
• 〈Mosquito Pools, Veterans, and Housing Points: Cabinet-Formation Pressure and Succession Culture in HKUST's Hall Associations〉 — "veteran culture" and cabinet-succession pressure at the hall level
• 〈Notes on Campus Governance and Institutional Reform〉 — the campus-governance background to the union's shift from "hard confrontation" to "pragmatism"