PolyU Donors, Major Gifts and Named Gifts

# Sources

Official and primary sources

• "PolyU Names New Tower in recognition of Dr Li's substantial donation", Li Ka Shing Foundation lksf.org: https://www.lksf.org/20010912/ – type: official (Li Ka Shing Tower 18 storeys, named 2001, HK$100 million)
• "HK$100m donated to PolyU", Li Ka Shing Foundation lksf.org: https://www.lksf.org/100m-donated-to-polyu/ – type: official (1 June 2000, HK$100 million, "largest personal contribution since PolyU's founding")
• "History | Pao Yue-kong Library", PolyU Pao Yue-kong Library: https://www.lib.polyu.edu.hk/about-us/about-library/history – type: official (named 20 December 1995, in gratitude for the Pao family's donation)
• "Naming Ceremony of Ho Iu Kwong Building and Ho Iu Kwong and Kwok Pui Chun Square", PolyU "Thanks to Supporters" page: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/giving/your-impact/thanks-to-supporters/2014/1014-naming-ceremony-of-ho-iu-kwong-building-and-ho-iu-kwong-and-kwok-pui-chun-square/ – type: official (Ho Iu Kwong Building Block W, seven storeys, 12,600 m²; square 1,300 m²; 14 October 2014; Fook Lee Group)
• "PolyU receives staunch support from the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation...", PolyU media release (2021): https://www.polyu.edu.hk/media/media-releases/2021/1018_polyu-receives-staunch-support-from-the-otto-poon-charitable-foundation-for-the-establishment/ – type: official (naming of SCRI and RISE, under PAIR)
• "PolyU establishes Otto Poon Research Institute for Climate-Resilient Infrastructure", PolyU media release (2025): https://www.polyu.edu.hk/media/media-releases/2025/0402_polyu-establishes-otto-poon-research-institute-for-climate-resilient-infrastructure/ – type: official (RICRI)
• "Our Appreciation | PolyU Foundation", PolyU Foundation acknowledgement page: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/giving/polyu-foundation/our-appreciation/ – type: official (acknowledgement list including the Chiang Chen Industrial Charity Fund)
• "Shaw Sports Complex - Fong Shu Chuen Hall", PolyU Student Affairs Office: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/tc/sao/counselling-and-wellness-section/sports-facilities/sports-facilities-and-opening-hours/shaw-sports-complex---fsch/ – type: official (Shaw Sports Complex named facility)
• "PolyU JCDISI joins hands with Shaw Foundation to pioneer STEAMS programme", PolyU media release (2025): https://www.polyu.edu.hk/media/media-releases/2025/0306_polyu-jcdisi-joins-hands-with-shaw-foundation-to-pioneer-steams-programme/ – type: official (Shaw Foundation HK$16 million, five-year programme)
• "Hong Kong Polytechnic University Campus Map", PolyU website: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/campus-map/ – type: official (locations of named buildings including Lee Shau Kee Building Block Y)

Third-party/media and encyclopaedia sources

• "PolyU receives HK$100 million donation from Otto Poon Charitable Foundation", EurekAlert!: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/876235 – type: news (Otto Poon HK$100 million, ATAL Engineering, "largest from a personal foundation in the past decade", two institutes and two chairs)
• "Jockey Club Innovation Tower", Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jockey_Club_Innovation_Tower – type: secondary (Jockey Club HK$249 million, Zaha Hadid, built 2007–2014, School of Design headquarters)
• "Pao Yue-kong Library", Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pao_Yue-kong_Library – type: secondary (Pao 1918–1991, World-Wide Shipping, named 1995)
• "Chiang Chen", Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Chen – type: secondary (Chiang Chen 1923–2022, Chen Hsong 1958, naming of Chiang Chen Studio Theatre)

# See also

• ./finances.md – PolyU's full annual financial picture and the definition of donations and gift income
• ../04-research/ – the research trajectories of named institutes such as Otto Poon's and the Jockey Club's
• ../05-campus/ – the geographical distribution of named buildings across the campus

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# III. A Deeper Read: The Ecology of Giving at PolyU

# From government dependence to philanthropic supplement: how the giving culture evolved

Hong Kong Polytechnic (as PolyU was then known) was founded by the government in 1972, and in its early years relied almost entirely on government funding – a textbook example of a government-led public institution. It was only in the 1990s, amid the wave of higher-education expansion, that the University Grants Committee (UGC) gradually pressed institutions to diversify their income, and the three-part structure of "government funding + tuition fees + donations" began to take shape.

Three phases of evolution can be sketched as follows:

Phase 1 (1970s–early 1990s): government-led, philanthropy auxiliary In its early years the Polytechnic focused on training applied technical talent and had close ties to Hong Kong industry. Gifts at this stage were mostly equipment, scholarships and industry sponsorship; large named gifts were still rare. The Pao Yue-kong Library (named 1995) is the landmark case of this phase shading into the next – behind it lay the change of institutional identity when the Polytechnic was granted university status in 1994, which itself boosted donors' willingness to give.

Phase 2 (1994–2010): university status secured, the era of building names After the upgrade to "Hong Kong Polytechnic University" in 1994, the scale and nature of giving changed qualitatively. The Li Ka Shing Tower (HK$100 million, 2000), the Shaw Sports Complex, the Chiang Chen Industrial Centre, the Ho Iu Kwong Building and the Lee Shau Kee Building all appeared in this period, rewarding donors with building names – the dominant "bricks-and-mortar naming" model. The donors were largely first-generation Hong Kong business leaders, with an evident emotional tie to the Polytechnic's industrial character.

Phase 3 (2010s–present): institutionalised, long-term, institute-ised From the 2010s on, institutional partners (Jockey Club Charities Trust, Shaw Foundation) and family foundations (Otto Poon Charitable Foundation) became the leading players in major gifts. Individual sums have repeatedly set records, but the object of the gift has shifted from "a building" to research institutes, a design school, five-year social programmes and the like. Per PolyU Foundation materials, from the 2010s PolyU has also systematically strengthened long-term donor-relationship management, with the share of earmarked programme funding steadily rising.

This trajectory broadly tracks that of Hong Kong's other UGC-funded universities (HKU, CUHK, HKUST, etc.), but because of PolyU's engineering/applied academic tradition, the donor base has always featured a conspicuously high proportion of local industrialists and industrial philanthropists – Chiang Chen and Otto Poon being the obvious cases.

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# IV. The Jockey Club's University-Wide Role

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust has long outgrown the naming of a single building at PolyU, functioning instead as a university-wide, cross-disciplinary institutional partner. Its footprint on the campus can be traced across three levels: buildings, research/design institutes, and community programmes.

# Buildings and spaces

• Jockey Club Innovation Tower: as noted above, designed by Zaha Hadid, built 2007–2014, funded by a HK$249 million donation from the Jockey Club Charities Trust. It is the flagship home of PolyU's School of Design and one of Hong Kong's most talked-about contemporary buildings (per Wikipedia^※).
• Jockey Club Auditorium: about 1,084 seats, opened 2000; PolyU's principal lecture theatre and venue for large events (per PolyU facilities information).

# Research and design institutes

• Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation (J.C.DISI): supported initially by Jockey Club operating funds, with social innovation through design as its core mission. Per PolyU media releases, J.C.DISI has in recent years worked steadily with social organisations and NGOs to drive design-led social change.
• The Jockey Club also funds teaching and research across several PolyU departments through earmarked programmes, covering fields such as gerontology, mental health, community inclusion and STEM education for youth (per materials from the relevant PolyU departments).

# Community and education programmes

• Per a PolyU media release (March 2025), the five-year "Shaw STEAMS for Good^※" programme with the Shaw Foundation is delivered under the organisational umbrella of J.C.DISI.
• The Jockey Club Charities Trust's customary model across Hong Kong higher education is: fund the establishment of a platform → support the initial phase of operations → gradually hand it over to the university to run autonomously. The same model is clearly visible at PolyU.

According to the Jockey Club Charities Trust's website^※, the Trust gives over HK$40 billion a year in total to local charities and community projects across Hong Kong, making it one of the territory's largest independent philanthropic bodies; many universities, hospitals, sports organisations and social service agencies benefit.

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# V. Why Do They Give? A Look at Donor Motivations

PolyU's donor base has a distinctive character within Hong Kong's philanthropic ecology. Across the public giving cases, several motivations stand out:

# The industrial emotional tie

From its founding, the Polytechnic trained local industrial and technical talent, giving it a far closer historical relationship with Hong Kong's manufacturing and engineering sectors than other institutions. Chiang Chen (injection moulding / Chen Hsong) and Otto Poon (electrical and mechanical engineering / ATAL) are both entrepreneurs of local industrial origin, and their giving follows a clear emotional and value-based logic – giving back to an institution that grew alongside their own industries. The naming of the Chiang Chen Industrial Centre is a direct embodiment of binding a hands-on training facility to the donor's industrial identity.

# A professional elite's sense of social return

Otto Poon started as an engineer, and ultimately pointed his foundation at smart cities, smart energy and climate-resilient infrastructure – three directions that align closely with PolyU's engineering strengths and flow directly from Poon's own lifelong career in electrical and mechanical engineering. As EurekAlert reported citing PolyU, Poon's gift was described as "the largest from a personal foundation in the past decade", showing that personally motivated giving remains an important source of PolyU fundraising.

# Naming as commemoration and legacy

Ho Iu Kwong, donating in the dual capacity of art collector and Fook Lee Group founder, had not only a building named after him but a square named jointly after himself and his wife Kwok Pui-chun. Such "double naming" is rare at PolyU, and points to the weight of family legacy and commemoration in giving decisions. The Pao Yue-kong Library, by contrast, was named by the Pao family after Pao's death, as a "memorial" continuation – combining a family tribute to a deceased patriarch with a gift to a public knowledge space.

# Institutional donors: reputation and strategy

For the Jockey Club Charities Trust, giving to PolyU serves both its charitable mission (social innovation, design education, talent development) and a strategic reputational interest – working with a star architect and building a landmark makes the gift itself a piece of public cultural conversation. The Trust's giving to multiple universities follows a similar logic: high-visibility projects reinforce its public image as a long-term guardian of Hong Kong society (per the Jockey Club Charities Trust^※'s own characterisation).

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# VI. Timeline of Major Gifts

The table below collates PolyU's principal named gifts by year, donor, amount (where known) and purpose. Where no official public figure exists, the amount is marked "—". The year given is the naming year or the year the gift was announced, not necessarily the year the funds were fully transferred.

Note: "c." (circa) indicates that no precise public record of the naming year was found in searches; the year is estimated from when the named facility came into use. No amount is asserted without an official source.

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# VII. FAQs

Q1: What share of PolyU's total income comes from donations? Per PolyU's annual reports, donations and endowments have in recent years accounted for somewhere in the low-to-mid single digits as a percentage of total University income, broadly in line with other UGC-funded universities in Hong Kong. For year-by-year figures, see finances.md. Compared with older institutions such as HKU, PolyU's philanthropic base developed later, but it has grown markedly since the 2010s.

Q2: What is the difference between a "named gift" and a general donation? A named gift (also called a naming gift) is one in which, once the donation reaches a threshold set by the University, PolyU names a building, research institute, chair or scholarship after the donor or a name of the donor's choosing, as a permanent commemoration and thank-you. A general donation carries no naming rights. PolyU does not publish the specific thresholds for each type of naming, but by convention the donation required for naming a building is considerably higher than for a chair or a scholarship.

Q3: Is the Jockey Club Innovation Tower used only by the School of Design? The Jockey Club Innovation Tower is the main home of PolyU's School of Design, and most of its space is given over to the School's teaching and studios. J.C.DISI is also housed there and runs social-innovation collaborative projects with outside partners, open to external visitors and partner organisations. The building's public areas (such as the ground-floor exhibition gallery) are occasionally open to the public and host regular exhibitions (per PolyU and J.C.DISI event materials).

Q4: The Li Ka Shing Foundation called its gift the "largest personal contribution since the University's founding" – has it since been surpassed? On the public record, the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation's HK$100 million (2021) matches the Li Ka Shing Foundation's HK$100 million (2000) in scale, but is described as coming from a "personal foundation" rather than as a "direct personal donation" – a different category. The Jockey Club Charities Trust's HK$249 million is larger in absolute terms but is an institutional gift. The "personal donation" qualifier means the two comparable-sized gifts are not directly comparable on the wording. For any precise comparison, the official position of PolyU's Institutional Advancement Office should be taken as authoritative.

Q5: How can an ordinary alumnus or member of the public give to PolyU? Per PolyU's "GIVE Now" page^※, alumni and members of the public can give by credit card, cheque, bank draft, bank transfer or telegraphic transfer, earmarking gifts to specific PolyU projects; donations are eligible for a tax-deductible receipt recognised by the Hong Kong Inland Revenue Department (donations must be HK$100 or more). The PolyU Foundation administers a range of earmarked funds, and donors may choose to support a particular department, research project, scholarship or community service.

Q6: What is "PAIR", and how does it relate to the donor-named institutes? PAIR (the PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research) is PolyU's flagship interdisciplinary research platform, which brings a number of thematic research institutes under one academic framework. The donor-established named institutes (such as the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation's SCRI, RISE and RICRI) are all affiliated with PAIR: they gain access to an interdisciplinary collaboration network while retaining their own named identity. The PAIR framework ties the donor's name tightly to PolyU's overall research reputation (per PolyU's PAIR website^※).

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# VIII. The PolyU Foundation's Fundraising Strategy in Brief

The PolyU Foundation is PolyU's principal channel and legal entity for external fundraising, responsible for managing the intake and allocation of donations, scholarships, research funding and other social resources. According to the Foundation's official page^※, its strategy rests on the following pillars:

# Tiered donor-relationship management

The Foundation manages donors in tiers, from principal donors to annual alumni donors, each with its own relationship-management mechanism. Principal donors (such as Otto Poon and the Shaw Foundation) are engaged directly by senior University leadership, and their gift agreements typically include specific academic deliverables and regular reporting.

# Earmarked giving and the naming mechanism

The Foundation encourages donors to direct funds to specific research fields, faculties or social programmes rather than into a general pool. The share of earmarked giving has been steadily rising, in line with donors' general wish to track the impact of their money clearly. The naming mechanism (buildings, institutes, chairs, scholarships) is the most direct, visible return on an earmarked gift.

# Alignment with University strategic priorities

According to PolyU's strategic planning documents (the Impact Areas framework), the University has in recent years aligned its fundraising focus with its five impact areas (health and ageing, smart cities, advanced manufacturing, sustainability, and art, design and humanities). The Otto Poon Charitable Foundation's smart-city and climate-resilience institutes, and the Shaw Foundation's STEAMS education programme, are both cases in which University strategic direction and donor interest have been successfully matched.

# Corporate partnerships and industry-academia giving

Beyond individual giving, the Foundation actively develops corporate gifts and industry-academia collaboration funds. Corporate giving typically takes the form of named scholarships, joint research laboratories or earmarked training programmes – meeting companies' talent-pipeline needs while providing PolyU with applied-research funding. This model fits PolyU's career-oriented educational positioning well.

# Long-term cultivation of the alumni network

Compared with older Hong Kong institutions, PolyU's culture of large-scale alumni giving is still being built. Per PolyU Foundation materials, the University has in recent years pushed alumni fundraising campaigns such as "From PolyU with Love", seeking to build a habit of small but broad-based alumni giving, in the hope of developing a stable alumni giving base over the next ten to twenty years. PolyU alumni associations across many countries and regions are also important nodes in the fundraising network.

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# See also

• benefactors-and-donors-2.md – the full timeline of major gifts (CMA, Chan Lai-ling, Cheng Yu-tung, Chan Cheuk-foo, Yan Oi Foundation, the Kwok family named lectureships, etc.)
• ./finances.md – PolyU's full annual financial picture and the definition of donations and gift income
• ../04-research/ – the research trajectories of named institutes such as Otto Poon's and the Jockey Club's
• ../05-campus/ – the geographical distribution of named buildings across the campus
• ../06-people/ – biographical and honorary background on the donors

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Figures and years should be checked against the Institutional Advancement Office, the PolyU Foundation and official announcements; where an item is marked "reportedly" or "no official figure published", this chapter is recording the limits of what a public search can verify, and does not speculate. The donors behind the names are recorded as neutral, positive facts.