The 2013 Orientation Camp Controversy: The "Caterpillar" Game and Questions of Propriety at HKUST Orientation Camps

HKUST's O-Camps have long been organised by student societies themselves, with participation voluntary (see The Full Record of Orientation-Camp, Society-Recruitment and Hall Disputes^※). One cost of this decentralised model is that the intensity of unified university oversight and systematic outside media coverage is naturally lower — in most years, the specific content of HKUST orientation-camp activities does not enter public view. September 2013 was an exception: over two consecutive days, The Sun published reports based on on-site observation describing body-contact games that appeared at several HKUST orientation camps. This was not, however, an isolated instance of "accidental exposure" — this article, tracing the matter further, finds that the same "Caterpillar" game had already been named in an Oriental Daily report on an HKUST Business School orientation camp as early as 2012, and that this thread still had institutional follow-up as late as 2024. Based on the original reporting and publicly available records, this article sets out, as faithfully as the sources allow, this thread of controversy spanning more than a decade, flagging the credibility level of each item without rendering a verdict.

Around 2013 was a period when Hong Kong society was giving concentrated scrutiny to tertiary orientation-camp culture generally. According to the Wikipedia entry on Hong Kong orientation camps, this round of public attention was not directed at HKUST alone: as early as 2002, an orientation-camp chant ("Dem Beat") shared between CUHK's Shaw College and New Asia College drew criticism over language said to demean female students and wording described as discriminatory toward people with disabilities. In 2004, an orientation camp run by PolyU's Faculty of Health and Social Sciences was reported by the South China Morning Post^※ to have required freshers to "lip-kiss" strangers and to solicit tampons or condoms from strangers; one punishment game called "Satellite" required a student to stick out their tongue while members of the opposite sex circled them — an organiser at the time was reported as saying this was meant to let freshers "experience the ugly side of society," an explanation participating students were quoted as calling "absurd." The two HKUST reports (2012, 2013) sit within this broader climate of social scrutiny — they are both a specific facet of HKUST's own orientation culture and a repeated local instance of a "propriety controversy" that has long existed across Hong Kong tertiary orientation camps generally.

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# August 2012: The Business School's "Caterpillar" — An Earlier, More Explicit Precedent

A full year before The Sun's 2013 reports, an HKUST orientation camp had already made newspaper headlines over the same game. According to an Oriental Daily report of 10 August 2012^※, an orientation camp jointly run by the School of Business and Management's Department of Management, Department of Accounting, Department of Economics and Department of Marketing saw more than a hundred freshers take part in the "Caterpillar" game — male and female students sitting on the ground alternately, each gripping the person in front between their legs to move the line forward. The report specified that female students' legs would come into contact with male students' groins, and male students' legs would come into contact with female students' chests and private areas, with participants forming a human chain in this posture and racing toward a finish line. The report was accompanied by on-site photographs showing some participants "laughing heartily" during the game, and one photograph showing a male student required to wear women's underwear as a "penalty" within the game.

Compared with the 2013 reports, two details in this report are worth noting. First, this camp was jointly organised by four departments within the Business School, rather than the (unnamed) camp involved in the 2013 reports — suggesting that games of this kind were not a one-off improvisation by an isolated society, but had circulated within the Business School for at least several years as one of the orientation camp's "traditional" activities. Second, according to the report, an HKUST spokesperson said in response to inquiries that the university reminds orientation-camp organisers every year that activity content should avoid anything "indecent, obscene, violent or offensive," but stated that, as of the report's publication, it had received no related inquiries or complaints — this is the earliest publicly recorded instance, so far as this article has established, of HKUST management directly addressing the question of orientation-camp propriety. By contrast, the student unions of the four departments involved, according to the report, had not responded by press time. Cheung Man-bing, chairman of the Education Policy Concern Group, was quoted in the report criticising the game as reflecting "poor judgment" and suggesting the activity should prompt broader social reflection.

Setting the 2012 and 2013 reports side by side shows the same "Caterpillar" game recurring in two different camps a year apart, with a strikingly similar pattern of response from management or student unions on both occasions — in 2012, "management says it reminded organisers and received no inquiries"; in 2013, "the student union denies some allegations and does not respond to the rest." Neither occasion produced a direct statement from either party on the game's design logic or whether it should continue. This continuity of response pattern suggests, to some degree, that the persistence of games such as "Caterpillar" in HKUST orientation-camp culture was not for lack of outside attention or media coverage, but that even after being named in reporting, it did not trigger substantive intervention or rule changes from the university.

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# 21 September 2013: The First Report, "No Holds Barred"

According to a Sun report of 21 September 2013^※, the paper's reporter observed activities at at least three HKUST orientation camps that year and alleged the appearance of several game segments described as "indecent," including:

• A "wet human pyramid": male and female freshers stacking on top of one another during a water-fight game, in which the report says participants, "caught up in the moment, repeatedly touched sensitive areas";
• A body-stacking competition: male and female students stacking on one another "sandwich"-style, in a speed- or height-competition format;
• A game segment involving sanitary products;
• Playful novelty games such as "barefoot banana games."

The report also made two further allegations: first, that some participants were suspected of drinking during the activities, and the report expressed doubt as to whether all participants were 18 or older; second, that a female student was allegedly placed in a rubbish bin and had water poured on her. According to the report, an unnamed student-union officer denied the "rubbish bin" allegation and declined to respond further to the rest of the report's content.

The tone of the report itself carries a plainly critical stance — the headline "no holds barred" ("淫招盡出") is itself a value judgment rather than a neutral description, a form of wording common in Hong Kong tabloid reporting, which tends to aim at attracting attention through a sensational headline rather than at academic objectivity. In relaying content of this kind, this article should note for readers that whether the specific conduct described in the report (water fights, stacking games, and so on) is in itself "inappropriate" depends substantially on the evaluator's own values — supporters might view it as a common team-building game intended to bring freshers together, while critics might read the same conduct as an infringement on students' bodily autonomy or as reflecting outdated gender attitudes. This article does not render a judgment on either side; it only records, as faithfully as possible, the specific conduct described in the report and the responses from the parties involved.

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# 22 September 2013: A Follow-up Report on the "Caterpillar" Game

The next day, The Sun published a follow-up report^※ focused on a game called "Caterpillar": male and female freshers taking part were required to grip the waist of the student in front of or behind them with their legs, forming a line that moved forward in a motion resembling a crawling caterpillar. Games of this kind, which by design require close bodily contact between the sexes through this posture, were treated by the report as a further example of orientation-camp games considered "over the line."

These two days of Sun reporting were subsequently cited by the English-language Wikipedia entry "Orientation camps in Hong Kong" as part of its record of controversial cases in the history of Hong Kong tertiary orientation camps over the years. That entry additionally records a game called "Jumbo" at the same HKUST orientation camp that year — requiring female students to lie on top of male students — as a further specific activity listed alongside "Caterpillar." By this point, "Caterpillar" had already made the newspapers at HKUST at least twice under the same name (see the 2012 Business School case above), a recurrence across years that itself poses a challenge to any explanation resting on "an isolated activity that got out of hand."

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# The Nature of the Matter: A Cultural-Propriety Controversy, Not a Criminal Allegation

It should be made clear that what the 2013 reports concern is a cultural and administrative controversy over game propriety, the boundaries of bodily contact, and doubts about underage drinking. The reports contain no specific allegation of sexual assault, indecent assault, or any other criminal offence, and there is no public record of any police investigation or judicial proceeding. This is fundamentally different, in nature and severity, from the criminal sexual-assault cases connected to orientation camps at institutions such as the University of Hong Kong and the Education University of Hong Kong in 2023 (see the comparison in the section below), and this article does not conflate the two on that basis.

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# 2023 Legislative Council Attention: The Institutional Follow-up

Although HKUST was not among the institutions named in connection with the 2023 orientation-camp criminal cases, that round of social attention still had an institutional effect on tertiary institutions across Hong Kong, HKUST included. According to South China Morning Post reporting, several Legislative Council members in 2023 publicly called for universities to strengthen oversight of orientation camps, with some members using the term "licensed sexual harassment" to criticise a longstanding culture of tacit tolerance at tertiary orientation camps. The Education Bureau and several universities subsequently made statements or introduced measures in response: Lingnan University set up an "Anti-Bullying and Sexual Harassment Ambassador" scheme to oversee affiliated societies' orientation activities; CUHK assigned two student representatives as "ambassadors" for each orientation camp, serving as the first point of contact for freshers facing sexual harassment or emotional distress; the Education University set up a task force to review relevant guidelines and require mandatory training for student organisers and participants; and HKU required student organisations running orientation camps to sign a pledge.

What specific measures, if any, HKUST took as part of this cross-institution policy response does not appear within the publicly reported material available to this article — which may bear some relation to HKUST orientation camps' longstanding tradition of being "organised by student societies with a low degree of university involvement" (see "The Full Record of Orientation-Camp, Society-Recruitment and Hall Disputes"). Because HKUST orientation camps lack a unified "Big O" structure coordinated by the university or student union, of the kind seen at CUHK or Lingnan, implementing a uniform oversight mechanism such as an "anti-harassment ambassador" across dozens of scattered department- and hall-level camps is inherently more difficult to execute. This structural feature — decentralised to the point where unified accountability is difficult to achieve — shows a certain resemblance, in institutional logic, to the recent trend at HKUST Students' Union Council of seats going to uncontested "one candidate, one seat" elections and representativeness being steadily diluted (see One Candidate, One Seat: The Age of Uncontested Elections at the HKUST Students' Union^※) — when grassroots student self-governance bodies broadly face low participation, external accountability mechanisms, whether for election competition or activity oversight, are more easily diluted as well. So far as records available to this article show, HKUST has not issued a dedicated statement or announced specific new rules in connection with this round of territory-wide orientation-camp oversight discussion in 2023.

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# 2024 Follow-up: The Equal Opportunities Commission Writes to All Tertiary Institutions; a Lawmaker Says "Collective Sexual Harassment" Has Become Routine

Public attention did not end with 2023. According to a South China Morning Post report of May 2024^※, at a meeting of the Legislative Council's Panel on Education, lawmaker Tang Fei of the Federation of Education Workers said that sexual harassment at university orientation camps had "developed into a culture," describing some orientation camps as occasions for what he called "licensed collective sexual harassment," and calling for stronger enforcement and heavier penalties. Equal Opportunities Commission chairperson Lam Mui-siu (林梅笑) said the Commission was "deeply concerned" about recent reports of sexual harassment at orientation camps, and had already written to all tertiary institutions in Hong Kong that April, requiring students responsible for coordinating orientation activities to undergo anti-sexual-harassment training and to proactively provide freshers with channels for seeking help.

This 2024 follow-up continues directly from the 2023 Legislative Council attention noted in the previous section — moving from "individual lawmakers speaking out, individual schools tightening oversight on their own" to "the Equal Opportunities Commission formally writing to all tertiary institutions," reflecting that social attention to orientation-camp oversight did not fade along with the news cycle, but moved gradually from public criticism toward institutionalised, cross-institution follow-up. The same report records the specific cases said to have prompted lawmakers to speak out again: a University of Hong Kong second-year student had earlier been arrested and charged over an alleged indecent assault on a fresher during an orientation activity, but the case was subsequently tried and the charge was found not proven by the court; Lingnan University was alleged to have run a "kissing game" segment during orientation activities; and the earlier Education University case involving rape, indecent assault and voyeurism (the case discussed in the previous section, involving a man alleged to have targeted at least four victims) was raised again. The not-guilty finding in the HKU case objectively adds a layer of legal complexity to the question of how sexual harassment at orientation camps should be defined and proven — the evidentiary threshold for a criminal conviction is not the same as the standard applied in public or administrative judgments of whether conduct was "appropriate," which is part of why the Equal Opportunities Commission chose an administrative measure — requiring training — rather than relying solely on criminal accountability, as its point of intervention. So far as records available to this article show, HKUST was again not individually named or required to make changes in this 2024 round of follow-up, and there is no public reporting on whether any HKUST response falls within the scope of the Commission's April letter.

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# Student Union Response and Aftermath: A Limited Record

According to material currently available, the 2013 student union side only denied the specific "rubbish bin" allegation, and there is no record of any further formal response or statement regarding the rest of the reported game content (Caterpillar, the water fight, body-stacking, and so on). So far as records available to this article show, there was no public statement from the university regarding these reports, and no follow-up reporting on whether that year's orientation camps were subsequently subject to a university meeting, review, or formalised rules as a result.

This article records the 2013 case as faithfully as possible based on the two original Sun reports and the facts as cited in the Wikipedia entry. Credibility: single source (both reports come from the same outlet, The Sun; no other independent news organisation is known to have cross-reported or verified the matter during the same period; the game names and specific details are also known only from that outlet's own on-site observation). However, setting the 2013 case alongside the independently reported 2012 Business School case in Oriental Daily — different outlets, different camps, a year apart, yet pointing to the same "Caterpillar" game persisting at HKUST orientation camps — this cross-outlet, cross-year corroboration raises the credibility of this article as a whole to multiply corroborated, even though any single report within it should still be flagged as single-source.

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# Comparison with the 2023 Multi-Institution Criminal Cases: HKUST Not Implicated

In the summer of 2023, orientation camps at several Hong Kong universities were the subject of a string of reports involving criminal allegations of sexual assault: according to CUHK's University Line and multiple other media outlets, a female fresher at a University of Hong Kong orientation camp alleged indecent assault by a senior male student, and a 20-year-old man was arrested; at an Education University of Hong Kong orientation camp, a 28-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of raping, indecently assaulting, or voyeuristically filming at least four female students, and the man was reported to have attended six different universities' orientation camps that same summer; and at Lingnan University, a video circulated showing a game segment at an orientation camp that was questioned as being of poor propriety.

According to Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) reporting from October 2023^※ and contemporaneous coverage from multiple other outlets, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology does not appear as one of the institutions named in this round of 2023 orientation-camp criminal-case reporting. HKU, the Education University, and Lingnan subsequently introduced, respectively, oversight-ambassador schemes, mandatory training, and activity-approval measures; there is no public record of HKUST being required to, or having voluntarily, announced comparable dedicated measures in connection with this round of public attention.

This article notes, as faithfully as the available material allows, this "not found" result — that HKUST was not named in this widely covered round of 2023 orientation-camp criminal cases — as itself a meaningful factual record rather than a gap attributable to "unable to verify": rather than forcing other institutions' controversies onto HKUST for the sake of assembling a "case," it is more accurate to present the actual contrast: that a case with traceable sources genuinely existed in 2013 as a propriety controversy, while HKUST does not appear in this later, more serious wave of criminal cases in 2023.

This contrast also raises a point worth considering: there are at least three possible, non-mutually-exclusive explanations for HKUST orientation camps' absence from the 2023 wave. First, HKUST's organisation and oversight of orientation camps may genuinely have improved over the intervening decade, without a recurrence of cases resembling those of 2012 and 2013. Second, the highly decentralised model of HKUST orientation camps, run separately by dozens of departmental and hall societies (see "The Full Record of Orientation-Camp, Society-Recruitment and Hall Disputes"), in itself lowers the density of systematic media tracking, meaning similar issues, even if present, might not necessarily reach public view. Third, it may simply be a matter of probability — the exposure of the HKU, Education University, and Lingnan cases named in the 2023 wave depended largely on victims choosing to report to police or on media investigation, rather than on any systematic census mechanism, and the absence of a reported case at HKUST during the same period cannot rule out an element of chance. This article, on the basis of material currently available, cannot adjudicate between these three explanations, and notes only, as faithfully as possible, that multiple possible causes exist for this "not found" result.

Setting the cases traced by this article on a single timeline makes clearer how these two categories of event — "cultural-propriety controversy" and "criminal allegation" — have alternated throughout the history of Hong Kong tertiary orientation camps:

From this timeline, HKUST's two publicly sourced cases (2012, 2013) both remain at the level of "cultural-propriety controversy," with no indication of escalation to the criminal allegations seen at HKU, the Education University, and Lingnan in 2023 — this is the boundary this article is able to confirm based on the material available, and it is also where a careful distinction must be drawn between "no more serious case found" and "no case found": the former is this article's actual finding; the latter is an over-extension this article explicitly does not make.

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# Placing the Sources Together: Reading a Thread That Spans More Than a Decade

• The nature of the 2012 and 2013 reports: both are critical, on-site-observation-style media reports, focused on the propriety and management lapses around the same "Caterpillar" game, and neither involves a criminal allegation. In 2012, management said it reminded organisers every year and received no inquiries; in 2013, the student union denied only one specific allegation, and the rest of the content received no further response or independent verification.
• The recurrence itself is a finding: the same game reappearing across years and across camps at HKUST, making newspapers twice, suggests this was not a single "activity that got out of hand," but closer to some "traditional" orientation activity that persisted within particular departments or circles.
• The comparison a decade on: in 2023, several Hong Kong universities' orientation camps saw a wave of more serious criminal cases, and in 2024 the Equal Opportunities Commission wrote to all tertiary institutions requiring anti-sexual-harassment training; HKUST was not named or individually required to make changes in either round — this itself is a fact confirmable from public reporting, not a gap in the record.
• This article's approach: neither omitting cases because they are older or some sources are single-source, nor over-dramatising or speculating due to a lack of further detail — this article sets out, as faithfully as possible, the specific content of the four cultural-propriety cases (2002, 2004, 2012, 2013) and the two cross-institution follow-ups (2023, 2024), flagging the credibility limits of each, laying them side by side, and leaving judgment to the reader.

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# Related Reading

• The Full Record of Orientation-Camp, Society-Recruitment and Hall Disputes: HKUST's O-Camp from "Self-Run, Voluntary" to University Involvement^※ — the overall arc of HKUST orientation camps' "student-society-run, voluntary participation" model, and the university's gradual involvement from 2017 onward;
• The Mosquito Pool, "Old Ghosts," and Housing Points: Succession Pressure and Hazing Culture in HKUST's Hall Associations^※ — another thread also concerning orientation rituals and succession pressure, recording Hall 4's "mosquito pool jump" custom and the orientation "SPY" undercover icebreaker mechanism;
• One Candidate, One Seat: The Age of Uncontested Elections at the HKUST Students' Union^※ — the structural background of steadily diluted participation in HKUST student self-governance, which follows a similar logic to the oversight-accountability difficulties discussed in this article.

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