Grants and Writing Resources for The Chinese University of Hong Kong

CUHK student teams won 17 awards at national and international innovation competitions in 2025, the most of any Hong Kong university, across six contests from the 19th Challenge Cup to the Seoul International Invention Fair. Writing has its own prize. At the Ninth Literary CUHK Essay Competition in November 2024, judges honored 24 essays chosen from more than six thousand assignments written for University Chinese courses.

Writing Prizes

The Department of Chinese Language and Literature has run the Literary CUHK Essay Competition every year since 2015 for all CUHK students and alumni. Most entries start as coursework. In the 2023-24 round, the 24 winners came from assignments submitted in University Chinese I and II and from an Open Group, and the winning essays were exhibited at New Asia College's Ch'ien Mu Library.

Research Funding and Competitions

The Professor Charles K. Kao Student Creativity Awards run every two years and pick student projects to represent CUHK in competitions beyond campus. The 2025 round drew 66 entries from six faculties. Eleven won, in separate undergraduate and postgraduate categories for individuals and groups.

Research postgraduates who want to present abroad can apply for Postgraduate Student Grants for Overseas Academic Activities, which support full-time research postgraduates conducting academic activities overseas, with applications passing through the student's division to the Graduate School. Some departments add money. The Department of Statistics and Data Science's Research Postgraduate Student Grant for Conferences/Workshops covers up to HK$15,000 per academic year toward airfare, registration fees, transport and accommodation.

Fellowships and Graduate Awards

The Graduate School pays MPhil and PhD students through Postgraduate Studentships, set at HK$229,200 a year for 2026-27 during the normative study period. Two larger schemes sit on top. The Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme package totals up to HK$1.81 million for the 2027-28 intake, and the CUHK Vice-Chancellor's PhD Scholarship Scheme adds HK$80,000 over three years plus a HK$30,000 conference and research travel allowance.

At the end of the degree, research doctoral graduates of 2024-25 could be considered for the Graduate School's CUHK Young Scholars Thesis Award 2025. The Faculty of Arts describes the award as recognizing outstanding doctoral theses and lists a doctoral graduate in History as its 2024 recipient.

Where Theses Are Published

The Library's Electronic Theses & Dissertations Collection lives in the CUHK Digital Repository, and after the Library added about 2,500 doctoral volumes that had existed only on microfiche, it describes the set as complete for CUHK's research postgraduates. Readers can browse by author, degree, department or year; the Law Library guide to finding theses walks through it. For journal articles, the Library's Scholarly Communications team supports open access publishing. It also manages the CUHK Research Portal.

Help With Writing

The English Language Teaching Unit's Peer Tutoring Scheme is open to undergraduates and postgraduates. Trained student tutors meet one-on-one about English writing and speaking, or send written feedback on an essay or assignment for any course; they may help identify error patterns for students to edit but won't proofread. Thesis writers can add the Library's workshops for postgraduate researchers, which cover research and thesis writing, thesis abstracts, Chinese thesis writing skills and reference management with EndNote and RefWorks.

When a paper, thesis, or dissertation is ready for a final edit, our editors can help. See our Chinese University of Hong Kong dissertation and thesis editing page, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.