Surge in donations to universities despite protests

Several universities in Hong Kong have seen a surge in philanthropic donations in the past year despite closures due to student protests and COVID-19 disruptions to research.

They include large donations from mainland Chinese benefactors, in particular for high-end science as mainland Chinese universities come under increasing United States scrutiny over alleged links to the military, and also to newly established Hong Kong universities’ branch campuses in southern China.

The universities said Hong Kong institutions’ ability to attract large philanthropic sums reflected the quality of their research and their ability to attract the best researchers, as well as the faith of donors that they will continue to do so. Wei Shyy, president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), said recently it was a vote of confidence in the future of Hong Kong’s science and technology sectors.

HKUST received more than HK$741 million (US$96 million) in the past year in ‘donations and benefactions’, according to its latest financial statement. This compares to just HK$62 million in 2018-19 – a more than tenfold increase.

Some of this is to go towards the development of HKUST’s mainland campus in Guangzhou, southern China, set up in 2018, including a donation of HK$100 million (US$13 million) from Chinese conglomerate Yuexiu Group last year and another HK$80 million (US$10 million) from the same group in 2020 to support the Hong Kong-mainland ‘unified campus’ approach.

According to Shyy, HKUST’s Hong Kong and Guangzhou campuses will complement each other. They “will adopt two different curriculums under a unified system”, allowing the two campuses to complement each other without duplicating the academic programmes.

The new system seeks to take the university’s education and research excellence “to the next level”, HKUST said in a statement issued on 23 December, announcing the Yuexiu donation.

Another HK$20 million was donated to HKUST in the past year by Andy Fei of the Y-Lot Foundation, a non-profit charity focusing on youth development, for an education and research fund at the university. Fei has donated to other Hong Kong universities in recent years.

Li Ka-shing donations continue

Real estate tycoon, Li Ka-shing, known as Hong Kong’s richest person, in 2019 announced a donation of HK$500 million (US$64 million) to HKUST through his charitable Li Ka Shing Foundation. It was for a synthetic biology research institute at the Hong Kong campus that will specialise in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.

According to the university, “the main vision of the institute is to develop Hong Kong into a global hub of synthetic biology, transfer research results under new policies and new models of education and entrepreneurship. In addition to this, it is also hoped that the institute will attract the world’s top scientific scholars.”

Li Ka-shing has been a major donor to the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and universities on the mainland in the past, as well as to institutions in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.

For example, Li supported the work of Jennifer Doudna who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, last year won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing critical genome editing technology CRISPR, which allows researchers to clip and insert changes to the DNA of animals and other organisms. She is now a professor at the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in the US.

In 2020 Li Ka-shing donated some HK$170 million (US$22 million) to medical science and educational faculties at four Hong Kong universities after government funding was blocked by pro-Beijing legislators over the involvement of their students in protests during 2019-20.

Li donated the funds to HKUST, HKU, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Education University of Hong Kong.

Most recently, in July 2020, he donated HK$101 million (US$13 million) to the medical and welfare sectors in Hong Kong amid the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, including cash gifts of HK$50,00 each to HKU’s fresh medical school graduates to ‘stay and serve Hong Kong’. Similar amounts will go to next year’s HKU medical school graduates, part of his HK$20.8 million pilot initiative to keep top talent in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) registered donations of more than HK$363 million (US$47 million) during 2019-20 – double the HK$135 million received in the previous year.

Hong Kong Baptist University received HK$315 million (US$40.6 million) in the year, up from HK$90 million in 2018-19, in part spurred by a new three-year Hong Kong government grant matching scheme which provides the same amount of government funding for every dollar raised in donations by the universities.

Other Hong Kong universities have yet to release their annual figures.

Both PolyU and Baptist University also had to allocate large sums for repairing damaged facilities after major protests in 2019-20, particularly at PolyU – scene of a major police siege in November 2019. Initial repairs amounted to HK$57 million, according to the PolyU financial statement, although the full amount is still undisclosed.

According to the City University of Hong Kong’s (CityU’s) annual report for 2019-20, CityU recorded a surplus of HK$639 million (US$82 million) for the fiscal year 2019-20.

“The high level of surplus was achieved primarily through sizeable donations and matching grants received for the University Grants Committee’s Eighth Matching Grant Scheme and the new Research Matching Grant Scheme during the year, combined with prudent management of operating expenses and the stewardship of financial resources,” a CityU spokesperson said.

The previous year CityU President Way Kuo expressed concern to a Chinese-language newspaper that some donors might pull out of donation commitments due to the protests.

An earlier version of this story was amended on 7 January 2021 to reflect CityU’s latest financial situation.