BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Three Illinois Wesleyan University students and a professor who traveled to China this summer will speak about the groundbreaking work of their team at the Asian Studies Colloquium Series on Tuesday, Nov. 13, from 12:10 p.m. to 1 p.m. in Room E 103 of the Center for Natural Sciences (201 Beecher Street). The event is part of International Education Week on campus, and the public is invited to attend.
The Series is an opportunity for faculty and students to share findings from their specialized research on Asia. The presenting research team, led by Thomas Lutze, associate professor and chair of history at Illinois Wesleyan, journeyed to the Chinese cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Peking and Hangzhou, to explore urban planning in post-Revolutionary China. It is an area that has been relatively untouched in the field of Chinese history, according to Lutze.
“This is a significant research topic in modern Chinese history that has been overlooked in Western literature, and not very widely researched in China,” said Lutze, whose team investigated how the Communist government of 1949 addressed the chaos of post-war China. “After eight years of World War II and three years of Civil War, the infrastructure of urban China had been pretty much destroyed. There were a lot of people who were in desperate need of housing, of health care, of schooling.”
In order to explore the issue, the team received an ASIANetwork Freeman Student Faculty Fellows Grant that allowed them to travel for nearly three and a half weeks in June and July to universities, archives and sites in the three cities. The five IWU students on the team were each assigned a topic to research: pollution, education, housing, sanitation and health care. “We were able to go into the stacks and look up articles, with the help of translators of course,” said Christy Ivie, a junior sociology major who studied efforts of the government to provide housing. “We walked through the housing built by the government. It was incredible to actually see what we were researching right in front of us.”