2nd September 2026 – (Hong Kong) Every August, Hong Kong’s universities enact a familiar ritual. A video surfaces, a camp is named, a statement is issued, and a disciplinary committee is convened. This year the footage came from what appeared to be City University’s management sciences orientation camp – a “Disco Night” in which a shirtless young man lifted a woman wearing only a red bra in a bridal carry, while classmates in matching yellow shirts waved glow sticks and cheered. The university responded within a day, expressing concern over “serious mismanagement” and pledging disciplinary action based on the severity of the findings. The affiliated committee apologised, admitting it had tried to caution participants but failed to stop them. If the sequence feels rehearsed, that is because it is. We have watched it before, and the repetition is the point worth studying.
The most useful thing to notice is not the six seconds of footage but the distance between the institutions’ stated safeguards and the reality on the ground. Back in 2023, when earlier scandals drew public alarm, the guidelines were laid out with apparent rigour. The Chinese University established a joint committee to vet student-led plans, banned city-hunt games, confined activities to campus where possible, and warned organisers against sexual and violent content. The University of Hong Kong instructed organisers to avoid sexually suggestive games and inappropriate body contact, and required separate dormitories. Lingnan issued training and activity guidelines grounded in safety and respect. A year later, in 2024, the Equal Opportunities Commission wrote to tertiary institutions urging mandatory anti-harassment training, while lawmakers described the camps as having degenerated into “licensed collective sexual harassment” and pressed for tougher enforcement. On paper, the response has been comprehensive.
Yet the paper has not travelled far. The mechanisms exist: pre-approval of slogans and games, on-site monitoring by staff or student ambassadors, mandatory sexual-harassment prevention courses designed by the EOC. The gap lies in whether any of it reaches the students who actually run the events. When a committee concedes that it warned participants and then simply could not restrain them, it is describing a supervision system that dissolves at the moment it is tested. The rules are real; the compliance is ornamental. This is a more serious problem than any single lewd game, because it suggests the institutions have mistaken the drafting of guidelines for the changing of behaviour.
These are adults, the argument goes, and a degree of excess is the province of the young; if no crime is committed, why judge them harshly? The reasoning is not worthless, but it collapses under the weight of what these camps have repeatedly produced. A university student is currently being tried over alleged molestation, rape and voyeurism against several women at an orientation camp. That is not youthful exuberance; that is the far end of a spectrum whose milder expressions—the vulgar slogans, the mock slapping games, the strip-to-your-underwear dares—have been normalised precisely because they are treated as harmless fun. The bridal carry is minor beside the rape case, but the two sit on the same continuum, and the continuum is what the guidelines were meant to interrupt.
The autonomy that once defined campus life has narrowed sharply. After 2019, when universities were cast as incubators of dissent, most student unions were dissolved, union publications ceased, and the space for genuinely student-directed activity contracted to a sliver. The faculty-level orientation camp is close to the last remaining pocket of self-governance students hold. That they choose to fill it with this, of all things, is the quiet tragedy embedded in the story. When the only freedom left is squandered on spectacle, the argument for granting more of it becomes very difficult to make, and the drift toward total oversight becomes not a threat but a near-certainty.
Which brings us to the harder question, the one the ritual obscures i.e. whether it is now naïve, even a little indulgent, to speak of the university as a moral and intellectual project at all. The demand that students embody self-respect and discipline lands awkwardly when the adults setting the example have their own record. Senior figures who hold both academic and legislative office have driven drunk and left the scene; staff corruption surfaces periodically; fabricated credentials recur; governing councils have at times functioned as arenas for factional combat. Young people are quick to sense hypocrisy, and a generation asked to hold a standard that their institutions visibly do not hold will not internalise it. Moral authority is not asserted through statements; it is accumulated through conduct, and much of it has been spent.
The camps will be regulated further, and the behaviour may retreat from view without disappearing. That is the likely outcome, and it is not the same as a solution. To rectify others, one must first be rectified oneself. Until the universities apply to themselves the seriousness they demand of their students, each August will bring another video, another committee, and another apology—and the older, larger question of what a university is for will remain unasked, because no one in a position to answer it is any longer expected to.
