Hong Kong City University staff and management in stand-off over New Year riddle revealing president’s salary

A Lunar New Year riddle posted on a City University noticeboard called the “Democracy Wall” has been twice removed by management this week for revealing the school president’s six-figure monthly salary. Tse Wing-ling, chairman of the staff association, said the riddle was put up on Friday in protest, after it had already been taken down on Tuesday and Thursday. He accused university management of suppressing free speech and interfering with the wall, which is managed by students. The riddle was made up with 41 coloured pages and was first put on the wall around noon on Tuesday. Initially it said: “Today is the Lantern Festival, a good day for riddles – the monthly salary of the City University president is HK$631,000 (US$80,404), while that for a grass-roots employee starts from HK$11,200 – guess the Chinese zodiac animal.” The top-heavy shape of the university’s pay structure was akin to the shape of an animal in the zodiac, the staff association was suggesting. Issac Chan Ming-yui, the acting student union president, said the management had approached him “too many times to remember” in the past week, saying the posters violated the wall’s rules and infringed on the president’s privacy and reputation. “I agreed to have the riddle removed the first time on Tuesday because it did not have a posting date and it contained more than 25 pieces of paper, which indeed contravened the wall’s rules,” Chan said. But the riddle was again posted on Thursday after Tse told students that the university was funded by public money, so the president’s salary should not be private. “Just like we all know the Hong Kong chief executive is paid HK$371,000 per month,” Tse said. Management insisted that the riddle was defamatory because the president’s salary was unnecessary Issac Chan Ming-yui On the second posting, Tse changed the wording to “the monthly salary of the best paid person in City University” and “the monthly salary of the worst paid person in City University”. The student union also allowed the staff association to put more than 25 pieces of paper on the wall. “But the management insisted that the riddle was still defamatory because the president’s salary was unnecessary – they said HK$631,000 per month and the phrase of ‘best paid person’ would make people think of the president,” Chan said. The management later sent Chan an email on Thursday night, notifying him of a forthcoming forcible removal, and ignored Chan’s response stating that the management had no right to interfere in the student union’s management of the wall. A City University spokesman said management decided to remove the pages after “multiple rounds of communication with the students union and had consulted legal opinion”. Explain pro-Beijing university president’s new five-year term, Hong Kong students warn, or face ‘consequences’ The spokesman said the posters violated the rules of the Democracy Wall because the content “inappropriately exposed personal privacy” and was “severely false and misleading”. The university did not offer a correction to the president’s salary stated in the riddle. Tse said the message was meant to highlight the pay gap between staff at the university. “Since the university’s salary ceased to peg the pay grades of civil servants in the year 2003-04, senior management have been paid more and more. And in the case of the president, he is more expensive than the chief executive,” he said. “The board is managed by the student union and is a platform open for free speech. If only messages approved by the management can be posted, what democracy is left there?” University in Hong Kong ‘surprised’ as mainland Chinese judges hold Communist Party meeting on its campus Way Kuo, an engineering scholar, became City University’s president in May 2008. The university’s annual reports show salary expenses for the best-paid staff more than doubled in 10 years, from a range of HK$3.15 million to HK$3.3 million in 2008, to between HK$7.5 million and HK$7.65 million in 2018. “We would like the public to consider if a university president deserves this much, and if it’s reasonable to have a salary gap meaning the president’s hourly pay is twice a junior staff member’s monthly wage,” Tse said. Chan said if management removed the riddle again, they would keep on putting up new ones. “We will also hold meetings to discuss how to prevent further interference by the management,” Chan said.