Hong Kong University Press and Its Flagship Publications

This article belongs to the "Wild History of HKU" module 12, Miscellaneous, of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) Wild History Reference Site. It focuses on the Hong Kong University Press (HKU Press): its historical origins, publishing scale, areas of strength, peer review, flagship series and overseas distribution. Information is current as of June 2026; founding year, publication counts and the like follow the Press's own official figures as the primary source, with divergent accounts presented side by side.

Academic publishing at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) is carried out mainly by its own in-house publisher, the Hong Kong University Press. This article lays out the institutional facts and representative publishing directions of the Press, including its successive heads, editorial board, flagship series and the latest open-access initiatives. For academic journals hosted or edited by HKU, see academic-journals.md; for libraries and special collections, see libraries-and-museums.md; for the broader institutional context of academic publishing at HKU, see hku-press-and-academic-publishing.md.

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# 1. At a Glance

On the figures: the Press's own website states "up to about 50 new titles a year" and a cumulative output of "over 1,000 titles"; the Wikipedia entry gives "more than 50 a year", "30–60" and even "more than 70" for different years or definitions. Following this site's "no mixing" principle, the accounts are presented side by side, and any citation should use the Press's own official figure for the year in question.

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# 2. Historical Origins

# 2.1 Founding and the First Head

According to the Press's own "History and Mission" page^※, the Hong Kong University Press was established in 1956. Per a South China Morning Post report^※, the publisher Henri Vetch arrived in 1954 to take up the post of the Press's first director (first director / head), serving until 1968.

On the discrepancy: the two-year gap between Vetch's arrival in 1954 and the Press's formal establishment in 1956 reflects two different milestones — the head taking office versus the institution being formally constituted. This site does not treat the two as contradictory; they are presented side by side according to the weight of the sources — the Press gives 1956 as its founding year, the biographical record 1954 as the start of the head's tenure. Each refers to something different.

# 2.1.1 The First Head's Extraordinary Backstory: Accused of Plotting to Assassinate Mao Zedong

Before Henri Vetch became the first head of the HKU Press, he lived through an extraordinary turn of events. According to biographical accounts compiled by the South China Morning Post and The World of Chinese^※, Vetch was French, and lived in Beijing for nearly three decades from 1920. After the First World War he joined his father's publishing business, running a French-language bookshop, the Librairie Française, at the Grand Hôtel de Pékin. The shop published works on a broad range of subjects, chiefly on China; among the better known is Annual Customs and Festivals in Peking (1936). Contemporaries described him as a man of "remarkable energy and great talkativeness", active in the European expatriate community in Beijing between the wars.

After the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, Vetch chose to stay in Beijing. In 1951 he was accused of involvement in a bizarre assassination plot — according to the charge, he conspired with friends to kill Mao Zedong by mortar shell during the National Day celebrations on Tiananmen Square. Later historical assessments have called the charge "pure fabrication, preposterous", but the consequences were severe: Vetch (then 53) was sentenced to ten years in prison, while two of his friends — the Italian businessman Antonio Riva and a Japanese bookseller, Ruichi Yamaguchi — were executed by firing squad. After three years in prison Vetch was expelled, made his way to Hong Kong, and in 1954 became the first head of the HKU Press, retiring in 1968. That arc — from a prisoner in Beijing accused of plotting to assassinate the nation's leader, to the founding helmsman of the Hong Kong University Press — is a little-known but well-documented biographical sketch of the Press's early years, and a sidelight on how the political upheavals of the early 1950s in China reshaped the fortunes of the foreign community that had lived there.

# 2.2 From an In-House Operation to a Global Publisher

According to the Press's website, it grew from a small operation that "initially published only a small number of works, mainly research by the University's own faculty", into a university press serving scholars worldwide, bringing out up to about 50 new titles a year and over 1,000 in total, with authors drawn from North America, Europe and Asia, and "global in its outlook". The JSTOR publisher page^※ describes it as publishing "more than 60 new English- and Chinese-language books each year" — a figure to be read alongside the "up to about 50" on the Press's own site. The difference may stem from the statistical year or from whether Chinese-language titles are counted; this site does not adjudicate.

# 2.3 From Henri Vetch to the Present Publisher: Two Eras Across Seventy Years

After the first head, Henri Vetch, retired in 1968, the Press went through a succession of heads. According to the Press's official contact page^※, the current Publisher is Michael Duckworth. Publicly available information records that Duckworth holds a master's in journalism and international public affairs from Columbia University and a BA in modern Chinese history and literature from Reed College. From 1990 to 1994 he worked as an editor at the Wall Street Journal in New York and as a Hong Kong correspondent for the Asian Wall Street Journal; then from 1995 to 2008 he was at the University of Washington Press, first as acquisitions editor and then executive editor, with deep focus on Asian studies, American ethnic studies and Middle East studies. As quoted in an HKU press release^※, Duckworth took up the post of Publisher in 2009, and has since overseen growth in the annual number of new titles while making the Press's electronic publishing and open-access work a priority.

From Vetch — the prisoner accused of plotting to assassinate Mao in Beijing — to Duckworth — a Wall Street Journal alumnus with over thirty years in Asian-studies publishing — the biographies of the Press's two emblematic heads mirror, in a way, the institution's own transformation from a small colonial-era academic publisher into a globally oriented Asian-studies press.

According to the Press's official contact page, the current editorial, production and marketing team covers acquisitions editors (with separate lines for humanities/language studies and for social sciences/health sciences/professional fields), an executive editor, project editors, production coordination, marketing, and a digital publishing and rights manager — a staffing structure with the full division of labour of a modern academic press.

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# 3. Areas of Strength

According to the Press's website^※ and the Wikipedia entry^※, the Hong Kong University Press enjoys a particular reputation in the following fields:

• Cultural studies
• Film and media studies
• Chinese history and culture

The Press also serves the local market, publishing in law, education, social work, medicine, real estate, architecture, linguistics and language studies.

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# 4. Peer Review

According to the Press's website, all publications must pass strict peer review before acceptance; per the Wikipedia entry, publication decisions are made by a committee drawn from HKU faculty and staff on the basis of peer-review results. This system is central to its quality assurance as an academic press.

# 4.1 Composition of the Editorial Board

According to the Press's "Editorial Board" page^※, the current editorial board comprises nine serving professors at HKU, spanning history, literature, linguistics, art history, sociology, engineering materials science, law and education. The website describes them as "leading scholars at the University of Hong Kong" whose role is to "oversee the peer review process" and uphold the Press's mission of "disseminating high-quality scholarship to a global academic audience". The members and their fields are, for example:

Note: the editorial board is as listed on the Press's website at the time of writing; membership may change with terms of appointment. This table is a snapshot verified in June–July 2026.

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# 5. Flagship Series and Representative Works

# 5.1 The New Hong Kong Cinema Series

In Hong Kong film studies, the Press runs the representative series New Hong Kong Cinema. According to public scholarly sources, the series comprises multiple volumes, each devoted to an in-depth analysis of a single Hong Kong film (with exceptions — Gina Marchetti's 2007 volume treats the Infernal Affairs trilogy in one book). The series is co-edited by Ackbar Abbas and Wimal Dissanayake, later joined by film scholars including Mette Hjort, Gina Marchetti and Stephen Teo.

The series has been published continuously since 2002. As surveyed in public academic literature^※, the films covered span roughly fifty years — from King Hu's 1969 Taiwanese swordplay classic A Touch of Zen to the Infernal Affairs trilogy, the Hong Kong crime films of 2002–2003. The selection does not restrict itself to strictly "Hong Kong productions"; it also admits works that have shaped or echoed Hong Kong cinema's aesthetics and narrative traditions, reflecting the series' approach of "using Hong Kong cinema as a method" rather than "treating Hong Kong as a production boundary". Contributors over the years have included a number of scholars from HKU's Department of Comparative Literature and related film-studies units. Among the Press's output it is one of the few sustained series built on in-depth single-work case studies (rather than essay collections), and it holds a standard, reference-like position in the English-language literature on Hong Kong cinema.

# 5.2 A Cross-Publisher Collaboration

According to public scholarly sources, Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema was co-published by Duke University Press and the Hong Kong University Press, and is regarded as a representative anthology in the field.

# 5.3 A Flagship Linguistics Reference: A Dictionary of Hong Kong English

According to the University of Chicago Press catalogue page and several academic reviews^※, A Dictionary of Hong Kong English: Words from the Fragrant Harbor, compiled by Patrick J. Cummings and Hans-Georg Wolf and published by the HKU Press, is the first dictionary devoted to Hong Kong English and one of the few dictionaries anywhere devoted to a "non-native" variety of English. It records only words and senses that are unique to Hong Kong English or carry a distinctly Hong Kong reference, with entries following modern lexicographic conventions: pronunciation, source language, frequency of use, cultural context — plus a short history of Hong Kong English, a list of abbreviations, a table of historical place names, and a list of "Hong Kong words" that have passed into international English. Academic reviewers credit it with laying the foundation for "establishing the legitimacy of Hong Kong English as a distinct variety". The case is a reminder that the Press's "areas of strength" (see Section 3) go beyond cultural studies and film studies — in linguistics and lexicography too it has produced works of global reference value.

Note: this site is strict about calling anything a "flagship work". Only items that can be traced to academic databases, publisher catalogue pages or multiple independent reviews, and that are directly connected to the HKU Press, are listed. Claims of "bestseller" or "award-winning" based on marketing copy or a single weak source are not repeated. For specific award records, please defer to the Press's official announcements.

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# 6. A New Open-Access Direction: Open Books Hong Kong

In one sentence: on 17 July 2024^※, the HKU Press joined with the Chinese University Press and the City University Press to launch Hong Kong's first open-access books programme, "Open Books Hong Kong", with an initial batch of nine Chinese-language titles in the humanities and social sciences made freely available for download worldwide.

According to the official HKU press release^※, the programme is a joint initiative of the libraries and presses of three universities: the University of Hong Kong (the Libraries and the HKU Press), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (the University Library and the Chinese University Press) and City University of Hong Kong (the Run Run Shaw Library and the City University Press). The platform is openbookshongkong.com. The first nine titles are in the humanities and social sciences, covering topics from global Daoist studies and women in China to advertising culture in modern China; three are from the HKU Press. The programme aims to fill a long-standing gap — the absence of open-access resources for Chinese-language academic monographs — and responds to the policy direction of the Hong Kong University Grants Committee (UGC) in promoting the globalisation of open knowledge. In the press release, Publisher Duckworth is quoted as saying that "scholars, publishers and libraries in Asia working together… can significantly accelerate the exchange of knowledge", framing the initiative as Hong Kong's potential role as a pioneer in regional open access.

The initiative chimes with the Press's established positioning — "predominantly English, with a bilingual programme for significant Chinese works" (see Section 1). Open Books Hong Kong concentrates specifically on Chinese-language humanities and social science monographs, and is in a sense a targeted response to the industry-wide problem that Chinese-language academic publishing has long lacked an open-access channel. It also complements the HKU Libraries' own HKU Scholars Hub open-access institutional repository^※: the former deals with the Press's formal publications, the latter with research papers and work-in-progress by HKU scholars. Together the two constitute the University's twin-track arrangement in "open knowledge".

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# 7. Overseas Distribution

According to the University of Chicago Press page^※, some HKU Press titles are distributed by the University of Chicago Press; per the Wikipedia entry, the Press also distributes through a number of regional distributors (for example, the Americas and the EMEA region were previously handled by Columbia University Press).

On the discrepancy: different sources name different distributors (Chicago vs Columbia), which may reflect arrangements differing by region and by year. This site presents the accounts side by side and does not treat them as contradictory; for the current distribution arrangements, defer to the Press's own disclosures.

Besides physical-book distribution, the Press's digital holdings are heavily accumulated on academic database platforms. According to the JSTOR publisher page^※, the platform hosts 814 HKU Press titles, spanning from 1961 (The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert) to new books on sale in 2026, across law, medicine, education, linguistics, film studies, cultural studies, art and architecture, urban planning, and Hong Kong and Macau studies. JSTOR also describes the HKU Press as "a leading scholarly publisher in Asia". This digital-archival channel and the Open Books Hong Kong programme described in Section 6 constitute the Press's two digital distribution routes alongside its traditional physical distribution arrangements — the former serving the paid institutional-subscription market, the latter offered free to the public.

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# 8. Cross-References

• Academic journals hosted or edited by HKU → academic-journals.md
• Library system and special collections, museums → libraries-and-museums.md
• Library system in detail and the HKU Scholars Hub open-access repository → hku-libraries-system.md
• Overview of the academic publishing system (complementary to this article) → hku-press-and-academic-publishing.md
• Digital learning and MOOCs → digital-learning-and-it.md

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