On October 17, 2025, Mercator Fellow Lin-chun WU, PhD, Professor at the History Department of the College of Liberal Arts of National Taiwan Normal University, gave a lecture in the BA seminar “Economic History of East Asia” at Ruhr University Bochum. The audience consisted of undergraduates and graduates as well as the doctoral researchers of the Research Training Group GRK 2833 East Asian Futures.

Professor WU presented her previous research into Sino-American economic exchanges in Republican China, focusing on the activities of the Standard Oil Company in China during the early twentieth century. She then moved on to intellectual exchange and modernisation efforts, focusing on Chinese engineers and economists who had been trained in the United States and returned to work primarily in government institutions. She emphasised the importance of infrastructure in general and ‘social infrastructure’ in particular. In this respect, the statistical knowledge and methods acquired during studies in America and applied in China played an important role. However, the lecture also highlighted the tensions between those who returned to China with innovative ideas and the criticism that some of them faced for their seemingly unrealistic methods lacking applicability to Chinese methods of accounting, budgeting, production, and management. Professor WU pointed out that American foundations were crucial for funding statistical surveys in China, such as those on the status of industrialisation and living standards. Her new book will provide ample evidence of this frequently overlooked connection.