January 24, 2001

Contact: Robert Lowery (509-963-1487/fax 509-963-2301/ e-mail loweryr@cwu.edu)

ELLENSBURG — More than 20 million children have already been born in China this year and the country now has a population closing in on 1.3 billion, according to the China Population Information and Research Center.

Residents in every major urban city in northern China are now exposed to air pollution levels three- to seven-times higher than World Health Organization guidelines. And, more than 75 percent of China's largest cities don't have clean drinking water because of a tripling of wastewater volumes produced there during the last two decades. Other forms of pollution also contribute to massive problems in China.

Later this year, 10 Central Washington University students and five faculty members will get a firsthand look at the impacts of environmental degradation, economic growth and societal change within China.

"The students will produce an interdisciplinary project on the question of sustainability of urban China," Dr. James Cook, CWU history professor and project director, says. "They'll be coming at the topic from five different directions: history, political science, sociology, economics and geography."

Cook and fellow faculty members Michael Launius, political science and director of the CWU Asia/Pacific Studies program; John Alwin, geography and land studies; Richard Mack, economics; and Hong Xiao, sociology, will serve as the faculty mentors.

"We'll also be working in close contact with East-West Center at the University of Hawaii," Cook adds. "Our students will go there for a week of study before heading to China."

While in China, the students, who will receive research stipends, will work closely with the Management Sciences Institute at Northern Jiaotong University in Beijing, one of Central's sister institutions, and they'll participate in a major conference on China's environment, Cook notes.

The CWU study will be subsidized through a prestigious new $50,000 grant from the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), designed to promote undergraduate scholarly activity. The NCUR grant program is funded by the Alice and Leslie E. Lancy Foundation.

The goal is to have five student-produced papers completed by the end of August, Cook says. Then, next March (2002) the students will present their findings at the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research conference. Those papers will also be published in an NCUR-sponsored journal.

An orientation session for interested students will be held Thursday, Feb. 1, at noon in the Samuelson Union Building Owhi Room. Student applications are due Friday, Feb. 9.