The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and Renditions: A Bilingual Scholarly Publishing Powerhouse

This is a factual archive entry in the Reference Zone (Miscellaneous, 12), carrying no credibility badge, with official and secondary sources attached item by item. It chronicles two flagships of CUHK's scholarly publishing — The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and the flagship translation journal Renditions. For a survey of the Press's flagship publications, see 12-misc/01-misc.md; this article focuses on the institutions themselves — their origins, the people behind them, and their place in the university.

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# I. Origins: From University Publishing Center to Press (1968→1977)

According to the Press's official "About" page^※, the Press's development has two milestones:

• Its predecessor, the University Publishing Center, was established in 1968;
• In 1977, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press was formally incorporated, with Dr. Francis K. Pan serving as its first director, per the source.

As CUHK's scholarly publishing arm, the Press positions itself as a world-class English-Chinese bilingual publisher — and it is precisely this bilingual character that sets it apart from the typical university press. The nine-year gestation from an in-house publishing unit in 1968 to a fully independent press in 1977 ran in lockstep with CUHK's gradual consolidation of its three founding colleges and the establishment of a unified academic structure in the 1960s and 1970s. The birth of the Press was, in effect, the publishing-world counterpart of CUHK's transformation from a "federation of colleges" into a unified academic institution.

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# II. Scale and Scope: Over Forty Years of Scholarly Accumulation

According to the Press's official materials^※ and University Press Library Open^※, more than four decades on, the Press has grown into a scholarly publisher of considerable repute:

• Fields of publication: history, philosophy, literature, translation, contemporary art, political science, sociology, anthropology, education, the history of medicine, and more;
• Scale of output: roughly 60 new titles a year, per the source, with a backlist of more than 2,300 titles, of which over 1,100 remain in print;
• Kinds of publication: both scholarly monographs and popular non-fiction, encompassing original works as well as translations into English and Chinese from a range of languages.

What "bilingual" really means: among the world's scholarly publishers, university presses capable of issuing high-level academic work in both Chinese and English are rare. The Press's bilingual positioning makes it a bridge between Chinese-language scholarship and the English-speaking world — introducing Chinese and Sinophone academic work to the world, and bringing international scholarship to Chinese readers. This chimes closely with CUHK's founding mission of "bridging East and West."

# 2.1 A Constellation of Authors

According to the University Press Library Open publisher profile^※, the distinguished authors who have published with the Press read like a who's who: sinologists Lucien Bianco and Derk Bodde, Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, scholar of Chinese literature Patrick Hanan, historian Cho-yun Hsu, and the towering classical scholar Jao Tsung-I — a list that is, in itself, a compact portrait of contemporary China studies and sinology. That a single university press could draw premier scholars from the Chinese-speaking world and leading Western sinologists alike testifies to its indispensable place in the niche of bilingual English-Chinese scholarly publishing.

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# III. Renditions: The Flagship of Chinese Literature in English Translation

The Press's other world-class calling card is the translation journal Renditions. Its birth traces back to a centre devoted to the study of translation.

# 3.1 The Research Centre for Translation: Conceived by Stephen C. Soong (1971)

According to the Centre's official history page^※:

• The Research Centre for Translation (RCT) grew out of the Centre for Translation Projects, established in 1971 on the initiative of the writer and translator Stephen C. Soong (宋淇, 1919–1996);
• Soong was himself a prolific writer and translator, long active in promoting translation education and research;
• In 1983, the Centre was reorganised and strengthened as an academic body devoted to the study of Chinese literature and translation, receiving its present name, the Research Centre for Translation (RCT).

# 3.2 Renditions Launches: George Kao's Doing, 1973

According to the English Wikipedia entry "Renditions"^※ and the Centre's official page^※:

• Renditions was founded in 1973 by the Chinese-American translator George Kao (高克毅, 1912–2008), who was then at the Centre as a visiting senior research fellow;
• It is the leading international journal of Chinese literature in English translation;
• Its coverage spans more than two thousand years of Chinese literature — from classical poetry, prose and fiction to recently published work.

# 3.3 The Directors: From Soong to Lawrence Wong

According to the relevant scholarly publication^※ and Professor Lawrence Wang-chi Wong's official profile^※, the Centre has had four directors since its founding:

A graduate of SOAS, University of London (PhD), Wong serves as Director of the Centre and Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Department of Translation. His research centres on the history of translation in modern China, modern Chinese literature and Hong Kong cultural studies; he has published over 14 monographs and more than 130 articles. Since taking over the directorship in 2005, he has steered the Centre's focus further toward the history of translation in China, while also serving as Executive Editor of Renditions and chief editor of two academic journals, the Journal of Translation Studies and Studies in the History of Translation. One man wearing three hats — administrator, journal editor and historian — he has been the Centre's de facto operator for nearly two decades.

In honour of Soong's contribution to translation studies, the Centre established the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards in 1997, conferred annually on scholars making original contributions to the field of Chinese translation studies. It is one of the few standing awards at CUHK named after a deceased member of the University and sustained continuously for decades.

# 3.4 The Curtain Falls After Half a Century: The 100th Issue, 2024

According to the Centre's official Renditions page^※ and the table of contents for issue no. 100 (Spring 2024)^※, Renditions had maintained a steady rhythm of two issues a year (spring and autumn) since its inaugural issue in autumn 1973; the official page states plainly that issue 100 "marks the ultimate edition of the journal after fifty full years of its publication" — and so Renditions formally came to an end.

• This 310-page "valedictory issue" gathers pieces ranging from a personified biographical vignette by the Song-dynasty poet Su Shi, to a partial translation of Yuan Yuling's Suishi yiwen, to English renderings of lyrics by the contemporary band Omnipotent Youth Society — spanning from the Song dynasty to the 21st century, as if to compress half a century of accumulated translation into a single volume;
• The official framing is one of retrospect and celebration — taking stock of the journal's fifty years of work and honouring its "long-standing role in facilitating communication between Eastern and Western literatures" — rather than a hasty technical shutdown;
• From its first issue in 1973 to the 100th in 2024, Renditions ran for exactly 51 years, producing exactly 100 issues — a close alignment of issue number and years that lends the finale a certain deliberate, ceremonial quality.

The complete life cycle of a journal: from Soong's idea in 1971, through George Kao's inaugural issue in 1973, to the successive stewardship of Minford, Hung and Wong, and the full stop of issue 100 in 2024 — Renditions ran virtually the fullest life cycle a scholarly translation journal can: birth, growth, peak, succession, and a dignified close. What bears noting is that what ended was the print journal itself; the Centre as an institution did not dissolve. Wong remains director, and standing mechanisms such as the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards continue to operate. The closure reads less as the end of an enterprise than as a change of genre.

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# IV. Renditions Paperbacks: From Journal to Book Series (from 1986)

Half a century of Renditions translations did not stop at the journal itself. According to the Centre's official "Renditions Paperbacks" page^※, from 1986 the Centre added the Renditions Paperbacks series, collecting translations scattered across past issues — or specially commissioned — into freestanding paperback volumes, complementing the journal's "best of single issues" with thematic collections.

• The series ranges across the centuries: from classical Chinese verse and tales of the strange, to bilingual or English-only collections of contemporary Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers;
• Representative titles include English renderings of the poetry of the late Hong Kong author Xi Xi, selected translations from mainland Chinese writer Wang Anyi's "love trilogy," and Vague Expectations (2020), a collection of essays by Xiao Hong compiled and translated by Howard Goldblatt — the series has consistently drawn on the work of prominent overseas sinologist-translators;
• Like the journal itself, the Renditions Paperbacks are distributed by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, sharing the same network of translators and reviewers — a division of labour in which the Centre curates and the Press publishes.

In a sense, the Paperbacks series offered a path of continuity after the journal's closure in 2024 — even with the periodical suspended, themed translations could continue to appear in book form, sparing half a century's worth of translator networks and editorial acumen from going to waste.

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# V. A Bilingual Classic: D. C. Lau and the Press's Perennial Bestsellers

The Press's "bilingual scholarly publishing" positioning finds its most durable book-level embodiment in the translations of pre-Qin classics by the great classical scholar D. C. Lau (刘殿爵, 1921–2010).

According to the English Wikipedia entry "D. C. Lau"^※ and the Chinese Wikipedia entry "刘殿爵"^※, Lau studied Chinese at the University of Hong Kong before reading philosophy at the University of Glasgow, returning to Hong Kong in 1978 to take up a chair professorship in Chinese language and literature at CUHK. His scholarship was marked by rigour and economy. His three English translations — Tao Te Ching (1963), Mencius (1970) and The Analects (1979) — were published by Penguin and are internationally recognised as the standard English versions for the study of Chinese philosophy in the West; the source notes that the Tao Te Ching alone has sold more than 700,000 copies worldwide.

• The Press subsequently acquired the rights to all three translations and reissued them as bilingual Chinese-English editions: per the Press's catalogue page for the bilingual Analects^※, the bilingual Analects appeared in 2000, the bilingual Tao Te Ching in 2001, and the bilingual Mencius in 2003;
• This arrangement — one translator, three books, Penguin for the originals, CUHK Press for the bilingual editions — encapsulates the Press's bilingual strategy. It need not translate from scratch; instead, it repackages translations already recognised by the international scholarly community in facing-page format, serving two kinds of readers: Western scholars who read English alone, and Chinese readers who want the bilingual text for reference;
• These bilingual classics have remained mainstays of the Press's backlist for decades, forming, together with the contemporary scholarship of Gao Xingjian, Jao Tsung-I and Cho-yun Hsu, the two principal strands of its catalogue — the former timeless classical translations, the latter research at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship.

For a complete roster of the Press's authors and a survey of its representative titles, see Miscellaneous Overview: Publishing · Libraries · Arts & Culture · Journals.

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# VI. Recognition: The 2023 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Awards

The Press's bilingual scholarly positioning has begun to draw recognition in the local publishing awards circuit. According to CUHK's official news item "Honours for CUHK Press"^※, at the 2023 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Awards (organised by the Hong Kong Publishing Professionals Society), the Press saw three titles honoured:

Among these, Animal Carnival collects the animal-themed verse of the late Hong Kong author Xi Xi, translated into English by Jennifer Feeley, herself a winner of the American Literary Translators Association's Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. A bilingual poetry collection taking one of Hong Kong's highest publishing honours gestures, in a way, back along the same track the Press and Renditions have trodden for half a century — "bringing Hong Kong and Chinese literature to the English-speaking world." Xi Xi's poems reaching English readers across the language barrier is precisely the path George Kao envisioned when he founded Renditions.

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# VII. What a Publishing Powerhouse Means

Together, the Press and Renditions have cemented CUHK's standing as a powerhouse of scholarly publishing. Threefold is its significance:

1. Dissemination of scholarship: bringing the research of CUHK and the Chinese scholarly community to Chinese- and English-reading audiences in high-quality form; the list of authors the Press has published — from Gao Xingjian to Jao Tsung-I and Cho-yun Hsu, down to Xi Xi, winner at the 2023 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Awards — is itself the best testament to this function;
2. A bridge between China and the West: through bilingual publishing and literary translation, spanning the gap between Chinese scholarship and the English-speaking world; Renditions, which from 1973 continuously translated over two millennia of Chinese literature before its dignified close with issue 100 in 2024, was the most concrete load-bearing structure of that bridge, and the Renditions Paperbacks series keeps the line alive in book form beyond the journal;
3. An extension of the University's cultural mission: the Press's and Renditions' sustained investment in Chinese literature, history, philosophy and literary translation is the publishing-world extension of CUHK's founding mission "to combine tradition with modernity, and to bring together China and the West"; mechanisms and titles such as the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards and D. C. Lau's bilingual classics convert that mission into durable scholarly institutions and a backlist that sells on, year after year.

A university's weight lies not only in how many papers it produces, but in whether it can spread knowledge in forms that endure and pass it on. The Press and Renditions are CUHK's world-class achievements on the "dissemination of knowledge" axis — they have carried the University's scholarly influence beyond campus and classroom, onto bookshelves and into libraries around the globe. From the University Publishing Center of 1968, to the Centre for Translation Projects Soong conceived in 1971, to Renditions' valedictory issue 100 in 2024 — this thread of publishing and translation strings together, in concrete and particular form, more than half a century of CUHK's "bridging China and the West" mission. And the Paperbacks series, together with the Press's perennial bilingual classics, proves that the thread was not cut with the journal's closure — it simply continues in the more durable form of a book series.

Related reading: Press Flagship Works and Books, Foreign Patronage Networks in the Founding Era, China Studies and Archives, The Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies, The University Library System: Seven Libraries, the Learning Garden and Rare Books.

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