The Vice-Chancellor and the Council Clash in Public — the 2024 Mr Zhang Affair and the Fight over "Academic Autonomy

Unofficial History section · Module 13. This article records a public dispute among living, serving, or recently serving parties. Official statements from all sides are presented side by side; no judgement on right or wrong is made. Sensitive personal allegations are attributed as "according to [source]"; in keeping with this archive's conventions, living persons who have held public office in recent years are referred to by surname and title throughout (Mr Zhang = HKU Vice-Chancellor and President / serving VC; Ms Wang = Council Chairman).

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# What is this dispute actually about?

In a single sentence: Between May and September 2024, Mr Zhang, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Hong Kong, and Ms Wang, Chairman of HKU's Council, erupted into open conflict over the appointment procedures for six interim vice-presidents — Mr Zhang charged that the Council bypassed the Vice-Chancellor's consultation and "severely undermined the century-old academic autonomy upon which the University of Hong Kong is built"; the Council countered that he twisted the facts and that senior management posts had been left vacant for too long. After the SAR Government intervened, a government investigation and study group submitted recommendations that the Council "fully accepted". Ms Wang's term expired and she was not reappointed.

This article lays out all parties' public statements in chronological order. Readers can judge for themselves. If you want to understand the institutional framework behind the dispute first — how the Council's 24 seats are composed, where the Chancellor (the Chief Executive)'s power of appointment comes from, and why the authority over vice-president appointments has long been ambiguous — you may start with the companion piece Who Actually Runs HKU^※.

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# Who is Mr Zhang? — Five years at HKU for a materials scientist

To understand this conflict, you first need to know the background of one side in this fight. According to the relevant Wikipedia entry^※, Mr Zhang was appointed the 16th Vice-Chancellor and President of The University of Hong Kong on 15 December 2017, formally taking up the post in July 2018 with an initial five-year term. He is not a career administrator but an internationally renowned materials scientist: BSc and MSc in Physics from Nanjing University, PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (1996). Before moving to Hong Kong, he was a tenured professor at Berkeley, famous for his work on metamaterials and the "invisibility cloak", research that Time magazine named among the major scientific discoveries of 2008.

This identity as a "scholar-governor" colours the vocabulary — "academic autonomy", "good governance" — he would later reach for so readily: he understands the vice-chancellor's role as the guardian of an academic community, not simply a chief executive. On his term, according to the same entry^※, the Council resolved in October 2021 to extend his contract for a further five years, with the renewal taking effect from July 2023. That means his term runs through to 2028 in theory. In other words, when the conflict erupted in 2024, Mr Zhang was not a lame-duck vice-chancellor seeing out his term; he was a serving head who had just been re-appointed on a fresh statutory term. This makes the question of "whether the Council can arrange senior appointments over his head" a particularly pointed probe at the core of the VC's authority. For the historical role of HKU's Vice-Chancellor — caught at the intersection of the academic and governance lines — see A Century of Power Tussles under Successive Vice-Chancellors^※.

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# Who is Ms Wang? — From barrister to watchdog chair

The other side in this fight was equally well-prepared. According to a South China Morning Post report^※, Ms Wang is an HKU alumna: she read law at HKU before taking an LLM at the London School of Economics and Political Science, was called to the Bar in 1983, and in her early career did her pupillage under barrister Andrew Li Kwok-nang (who would later become the first Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal in 1997). She has since practised for many years in intellectual property, civil litigation, and mediation and arbitration.

In public service, Ms Wang was appointed a member of HKU's Council from March 2017, and in December 2021 the government announced she would succeed the then-Chairman Arthur Li, taking up the post of Council Chairman from 1 January 2022 for a three-year term. During the same period, she also chaired the Minimum Wage Commission and the Independent Police Complaints Council (IPCC), among other bodies. This means that her departure on 31 December 2024 was simply the expiry of a fixed three-year contract that began in 2022, not a premature termination — it was the government's subsequent choice "not to reappoint" rather than "to reappoint" that became the substantive conclusion of the saga, as detailed in the chronology below.

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# How did the storm break? — Anonymous complaints and investigation in 2023

The earliest documented source of the controversy is late September 2023^※, when a batch of anonymous "whistle-blowers" sent complaint emails to all 24 Council members, the Registrar, and Vice-Chancellor Mr Zhang, alleging mismanagement including misuse of funds and the engagement of headhunting firms without going through procurement procedures.

According to a statement by Council Chairman Ms Wang on 4 October 2023^※, the Council characterised the matter as "complaints" and pledged to "handle them fairly, impartially and seriously in accordance with the established policies of HKU", citing privacy protection as the reason it would "not comment on specific personnel matters".

Notably, while the investigation was still ongoing, the first crack within the University had already opened over the competing impulses towards "confidentiality" and "openness". According to an Initium Media report^※, in October 2023, ten members of HKU's Court issued a joint statement criticising the Council for failing to provide a formal account of the governance allegations against the VC and the related meeting arrangements; they demanded the lifting of confidentiality requirements, the release of documents, and the establishment of an independent investigation committee to hold public hearings. The Council, for its part, insisted on handling the matter through its established confidential procedures. This tussle over "transparency" ran through the entire saga — from the investigation of the anonymous complaints to the fact that the full text of the 2024 investigation and study group's recommendations was never released publicly, "who gets to decide what stays confidential" was a persistent undercurrent.

After six months, the investigation led by an independent panel concluded on 13 April 2024^※ that "all allegations made by the anonymous 'whistle-blower(s)' were not substantiated". Mr Zhang was fully cleared and issued an eight-point statement that evening, saying the investigation had "vindicated him". Yet the clearance did not mend the rift — those familiar with HKU's internal politics largely considered that after six months of "Whistleblower Gate", whatever trust had existed between the VC and the Council Chairman was now almost entirely gone.

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# What else did the anonymous complaints unearth? — A scholarship list worth millions, "fully disbursed"

"Whistleblower Gate" was not just about abstract allegations of "mismanagement". One specific item only came to media light in October 2024: a list of scholarship beneficiaries provided to a mainland Chinese donor contained multiple inaccuracies.

According to the timeline compiled by HK01^※: between September and December 2021, Mr Zhang was in contact with the Zhuhai-listed company Ninestar, facilitating its donation of RMB 10 million through the Chinese Red Cross Foundation to HKU for the establishment of scholarships. From June to December 2022, HKU provided the donor with a list of 49 mainland Chinese undergraduates as beneficiaries and signed an agreement; the first tranche of RMB 8.5 million was received. In August 2023, HKU informed the donor that the scholarships had been "fully disbursed".

But according to the same report, this list was plagued with problems: 17 of the 49 students had never even enrolled at HKU; another 11 had already received other scholarship funding as early as September 2022, leaving only 21 students who truly met the donor's conditions. The matter only came to light after the anonymous complaint emails surfaced in September 2023. HKU subsequently apologised to the donor in November of that year, and the second tranche of RMB 1.5 million, not yet disbursed, was consequently put on hold.

The University administration acknowledged "multiple errors in the list"; Mr Zhang stated that he only became aware of the problems after the complaint emails were exposed, and said "it cannot be assumed that a final decision had already been made on this matter beforehand". This episode and the vice-president appointment storm are two parallel threads, but both fell within the scope of the 2023 anonymous complaints investigation — at the time, the Council concluded that the available evidence was "insufficient to establish" the allegations against Mr Zhang personally, but that the University had made administrative mistakes was undisputed. This digression illustrates the point: the prolonged 2023–2024 investigation was about far more than just HR appointments. HKU was, at that time, fending off accountability pressures on multiple fronts simultaneously.

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# Why did the situation spiral right after Mr Zhang was cleared? — The 28 May "reshuffle"

Less than two months after Mr Zhang was exonerated, the situation deteriorated rapidly. According to multiple reports^※, at its meeting on 28 May 2024, the Council approved the appointment of six interim vice-presidents without consulting the Vice-Chancellor, along with a series of other personnel movements:

According to related reports^※, Richard Wong, who is seen as close to Mr Zhang, was demoted in this reshuffle. The appointments were also announced not by the University administration but directly by the Council — a move critics decried as breaking with established convention.

The exact count of these appointments varies slightly across different outlets: Dimsum Daily and the South China Morning Post's accounts focus on six core post changes, while a more granular HK01 report^※ noted that a total of seven interim arrangements were passed at the meeting, which, combined with two Dean-level concurrent interim vice-president posts created, brought the total number of VPs to nine — consistent with Ming Pao's description of a roughly "5 to 4" ratio of new to old faces. The seven-person list was as follows:

According to the same report, Mr Zhang "expressed shock and opposed" the arrangement during the meeting, but the Council passed it with a large majority — this was the first time in HKU's history that an entire slate of vice-president appointments had been initiated by the Council, not the VC.

According to a Ming Pao report on 30 May 2024^※, this round of appointments swelled the total number of HKU vice-presidents (including interim posts) to nine at a stroke, with a ratio of new to old members of roughly 5 to 4. In an internal letter, Mr Zhang described the move as an "ambush" and bluntly stated that the damage done to the University was "irreparable". Notably, these personnel moves did not happen in a vacuum: Mr Zhang had been cleared in the anonymous complaint investigation only months earlier, and the suspicion accumulated during "Whistleblower Gate" had already brought relations between the two sides to a boil — several people familiar with HKU politics told the media that the VC and the Chairman "could no longer work together". In other words, the 28 May reshuffle was both the spark and the coming-to-the-surface of a much longer tension.

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# What did Mr Zhang say? — "Severely undermined a century of academic autonomy"

After news of the reshuffle broke, Mr Zhang sent an internal email to all staff and students in early June 2024, which immediately drew widespread media attention.

As quoted by Dimsum Daily^※:

Mr Zhang's words (as cited by media): The Council's actions had "severely undermined the century-old academic autonomy upon which the University of Hong Kong is built"; the nominations for the vice-president posts had been "neither recommended by me, nor was I consulted"; the approach "contravenes established procedures and disregards the fundamental principles of good governance".

Mr Zhang also stressed that "it is my duty to safeguard the century-old traditions, mechanisms and procedures that constitute the smooth operation of the University." He further stated that HKU had "been consumed by infighting," affecting normal University operations and its international reputation.

According to the same report^※, Mr Zhang also criticised a proposal for an office for Ms Wang on campus, arguing it could further erode academic autonomy.

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# How did the Council hit back? — "Frequent management issues" and "twisting the facts"

On 10 June 2024, the Council issued an open letter to all staff, students, and alumni, launching a direct rebuttal to Mr Zhang's accusations.

As cited by a South China Morning Post report on the Council letter^※:

The Council's core position: As the "supreme governing body of the University", the Council holds the statutory power to appoint senior management; Mr Zhang's claim that he was "not informed" was inconsistent with the facts, as he had prior knowledge of the decisions.

The Council's criticism: Since Mr Zhang took office in 2018, multiple vice-president posts had been left vacant for extended periods, leading to an incomplete management team and giving rise to "frequent management issues". The Council argued that this was precisely why it needed to step in directly on personnel matters.

Mr Zhang's response to the Council letter: That same evening, he hit back, stating the Council's statement contained "inaccuracies and unfair criticism" and insisting that the agenda for the meetings he attended contained "no mention whatsoever of any vice-president appointments" — a direct contradiction to the Council's claim that he had been "informed".

The two sides' accounts contradict each other. This article records them side by side and does not judge which is factually correct.

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# What did alumni and observers think?

After the dispute went public, several former Council members and prominent alumni voiced their opinions.

According to a South China Morning Post report^※, eight former Council members and alumni, including former Secretary for Education Fanny Law, signed a joint petition to Chief Executive John Lee asking him to intervene, expressing no confidence in Ms Wang's leadership; they argued that the Council's role is oversight, not direct involvement in administrative matters, and that the blurring of these roles had damaged HKU's international reputation.

On campus, according to a Times Higher Education report^※, student representative Casey Chik considered the short-term direction of the government's intervention appropriate but called for "more transparency". HKU alumnus Patrick Poon criticised the government's handling as "doing all it can to shut everyone up," questioning the lack of transparency in the relevant accountability codes.

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# How did the government step in? — The Chief Executive intervenes and a study group is formed

The dispute escalated rapidly to the SAR Government level. According to a South China Morning Post report^※, Chief Executive John Lee (also HKU Chancellor) met separately with Mr Zhang and Ms Wang "more than once" on 11 June 2024, stressing the need for "good communication".

Composition of the Investigation and Study Group (according to an ISD press release on 3 September 2024^※):

After its formation, the Group held over 60 meetings^※ with relevant parties, including Council members, the Vice-Chancellor, senior management, and reviewed relevant documents.

The Group's focus: to make recommendations on senior appointment arrangements, guided by the principles of "giving paramount consideration to HKU's overall interest, resolving differences to ensure smooth operation, fostering communication among stakeholders, and ensuring compliance with the University Accountability Agreement". The Group also noted that many senior posts at HKU were vacant (including Provost, several Vice-Presidents, Registrar, and Deans), urging the University to "complete recruitment as soon as possible".

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# Was this group an "investigation" or a "fudge"? — The nature of the body

The moment the Investigation and Study Group was established, its very nature became a point of contention: was it an independent tribunal to get to the bottom of the matter, or a government-led mediation mechanism? The official answer leaned towards the latter. According to a report in The Standard^※, then-Secretary for Education Christine Choi stated clearly that the Group was "not established to probe and publish an investigation report into specific incidents"; its task was "to establish facts, understand the differences between the two leaders, facilitate internal communication, offer advice, and review whether the University's University Accountability Agreement has been complied with". She stressed that "communication and fact-finding are all important", and set ensuring smooth University operations over the summer and into the new academic year as the primary goal. The government also did not set a completion deadline.

One institutional anchor for the Group's work was the "University Accountability Agreement" — the accountability document covering governance, finance, and performance signed between the UGC and funded institutions. According to the ISD statement^※, one of the Group's tasks was precisely to review whether HKU had complied with this Agreement in these appointment processes. This explains why the UGC Chairman was one of its co-convenors: the government framed the dispute as "whether the university had acted according to the public-funding accountability framework", not "whose character is better, the VC or the Council Chairman". The Group conducted over 60 meetings and reviewed documents before ultimately landing its conclusions on the relatively adjudicable, technical ground of "whether procedure was followed", rather than on right and wrong between the individuals.

This positioning — "establish facts and facilitate communication" instead of "investigate and assign blame" — became the basis for later scepticism. Critics pointed out that the Group was led by two convenors who were themselves government or quasi-government figures^※, and according to a Times Higher Education report^※, observers felt "a body led by the EDB and the UGC could hardly be called an independent investigation". HKU alumnus Patrick Poon bluntly stated the government was "doing all it can to shut everyone up". Supporters, on the other hand, argued that given HKU receives vast amounts of public money and the dispute was disrupting normal operations, bringing in officials familiar with the higher education funding system to mediate was a pragmatic way to restore order. Two assessments are presented side by side; this article makes no judgement.

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# The outcome and the resolution

On 3 September 2024, the Investigation and Study Group formally submitted its recommendations to the Council. According to the ISD statement^※, the Council "fully accepted" the Group's recommendations, believing the measures would "help the University return to normal operations as soon as possible." The phrasing was watertight but also sidestepped the core question of the whole controversy: who was right and who was wrong?

According to a report in The Standard^※, a key conclusion of the Group was that the Council's earlier appointment of six interim vice-presidents was deemed "invalid", and it urged the Council and management to complete the selection process for senior posts, including Provost, Vice-President, Registrar, and Deans, according to established procedures as soon as possible. This "declaration of invalidity" essentially rescinded the very batch of appointments that had ignited the conflict on 28 May — in terms of the result, it leaned towards the procedural argument put forward by Mr Zhang. According to a Times Higher Education report^※, people familiar with the matter also revealed that the recommendations overall tended to favour Mr Zhang over Ms Wang; Richard Wong, who was earlier demoted, was reinstated in an acting capacity after the affair.

Ms Wang's departure: Ms Wang's term as Council Chairman expired on 31 December 2024^※. After the Chief Executive expressed thanks, he did not reappoint her, and six Council members from the same cohort also stepped down simultaneously. On 27 November 2024, the Chief Executive, in his capacity as Chancellor, announced the appointment of veteran banker Mr Peter Wong Tung-shun (Non-executive Chairman of HSBC Holdings) as the new Council Chairman from 1 January 2025 for a three-year term, along with five new external members to the Council. According to a Hong Kong Free Press report^※, this pick was widely interpreted as an attempt to steady the Council with a deeply experienced, relatively uncontroversial business elder after "a year of acrimony". These appointments were made using the existing powers granted to the Chancellor under the University of Hong Kong Ordinance; the mechanism itself remains unchanged. For details, see Who Actually Runs HKU^※.

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# What deeper structural issues does this case expose?

This storm refracts the inherent tension within HKU's "dual-line governance" structure:

According to a Times Higher Education report^※, a notable background detail is that six members of the Council are appointed by the Chief Executive, including Martin Liao Cheung-kong, a pro-Beijing Legislative Council member who is Ms Wang's spouse. This personal connection was flagged by observers as a potential conflict of interest, but no party has ever formally addressed it publicly.

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# Are 2024 and 2015 the same story? — Comparing the two storms

HKU has been in the headlines for top-level personnel strife twice in the past decade. It's tempting to conflate the two, but the points of contention were essentially opposite. The core of the 2015 Pro-Vice-Chancellor selection controversy^※ was that a selection committee unanimously recommended an internal candidate, and a majority on the Council vetoed it — the debate was about whether the Council "had the power to block an appointment that carried academic backing". The 2024 conflict inverted this: the Council actively pushed through a batch of interim vice-presidents the VC had never nominated — the debate was about whether the Council "had the power to bypass the VC and arrange senior personnel on its own".

The common bedrock of both storms is the same "dual-line governance" structure: the power boundary between the academic line (Senate, VC, selection committees) and the governance line (the Council and the Chancellor's appointment power behind it) has always been ambiguous on top-level personnel matters. According to Times Higher Education^※ and multiple reports, whether it was the "veto" of 2015 or the "overreach appointment" of 2024, the outcome ultimately depended on the majority will of the 24-member Council — and this is the institutional core that every round of reform discussion keeps circling back to, yet has never managed to alter. For the long thread of governance stretching from the 1911 University Ordinance to the present, see A Century of Governance Reform^※.

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# After the change of guard: What does the HKU landscape look like under Peter Wong?

About a year after the new Chairman took office, how does mainstream commentary assess the wrap-up of this storm? According to a 2025 South China Morning Post editorial^※, the commentary argued that the past year's "protracted feud between the governing body and the vice-chancellor over senior appointments and other matters" had damaged HKU's reputation, with the public quarrel at one point threatening the university's international image. The editorial expressed hope that Peter Wong's corporate governance experience would be an asset, stating the appointment "should draw a line under the infighting" and relaying the government's line that the arrival of the new Chairman and five new Council members aimed to "start a new chapter" for HKU's governance. The same editorial warned that if the conflict dragged on, it would damage not only the university's reputation but also Hong Kong's overall ability to attract academic talent, and that the immediate priority was to refocus on education itself and use the new leadership to steady the ship.

This piece of commentary itself illustrates a point: by the time it was published, the focus of HKU's governance circle and outside observers had already shifted from "who was right and who was wrong" to "can we turn the page" — but whether the storm has truly been turned, and what Mr Zhang's actual working relationship with the new Council is like, remain matters with limited public information, as noted in the "Unresolved matters" section below.

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# Unresolved matters and issues requiring verification in this case

• Full text of the Study Group's recommendations: The government and Council have never released the original text of the recommendations, only announcing their "full acceptance"; specific contents come from media disclosures by people familiar with the matter, not official documents.
• Whether Richard Wong was formally reinstated: Media reports state he was "restored to his original post in an acting capacity", but this article has been unable to confirm whether the title change was officially gazetted.
• Identity and motives of the anonymous whistle-blower(s): No public information reveals whether the whistle-blowers were connected to the Council side; any such inference remains unverified.
• Mr Zhang's future term: According to publicly available information^※, the Council resolved in October 2021 to extend his contract to 2028; however, as of the update date of this article (2026-07-10), beyond media editorials expressing hopeful expectations, there is no more specific public information available to verify Mr Zhang's actual working relationship with the new Council Chairman or whether his term will run its full course. This article makes no inference.

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# Timeline at a glance

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# Related reading

• Who Actually Runs HKU — Council Composition, Government-Appointed Members, and the Chancellor (Chief Executive)'s Power of Appointment
• The 2015 Pro-Vice-Chancellor Selection Controversy — The First Time a Selection Committee Recommendation Was Vetoed by Council
• A Century of Governance Reform — From the 1911 University Ordinance to the Battle over Council Reform
• A Century of Power Tussles under Successive Vice-Chancellors — From Rayson Huang to the 2000 Polling Controversy

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