The Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong has as its Strategic Research Theme "China-West Studies", including language and culture studies (see http://arts.hku.hk/research/china_west.html). It is proposed to organize a special session devoted to "China-West" language studies, with special reference to cross-cultural issues in the understanding and representation of language, interactions between linguistic traditions, the nature of writing systems, the status of the term "dialect", etc.