Building upon accomplishments and successes in the first seven conferences, the CACLER has collaborated with 10 academic units in China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan to co-host the 8th International Conference on Han Characters Education and Research (第八屆〝漢字與漢字教育〞國際研討會) at Kusatsu, Japan on 17-19 January 2018. The Conference provides a platform bringing together scholars, researchers and practitioners from different countries to discuss and share their ideas, perspectives, experiences and research insights into how variations of Han characters feature and are taught in a number of Asian languages, such as Korean, Japanese, Mainland Chinese, Singaporean, Taiwanese and Vietnamese. Building upon the success of the previous seven conferences, the cross-border partnership has been increased from two institutions in 2011 to ten at present, including Kaohsiung Normal University; Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, Taiwan; Beijing Normal University; ; ; ; ; ; and the CACLER.

The Conference has attracted 150 education researchers and frontline teachers from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Macau and Hong Kong, and around 100 presentations have been conducted. Twenty scholars and research students from HKU also took part in the paper presentation sessions.