CAS Academician Wu Chuanjun
Senior academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Wu Chuanjun died in Beijing on Friday at the age of 91.
Wu was one of the country's leading geographers who promoted studies for the utilization of land resources and agricultural development.
He was former vice president of the International Geographical Union (IGU) and former editor of Beijing-based Journal of Geographical Sciences. Wu was a member of both the Communist Partyand the Jiu San (Sept. 3rd) Society, one of China's democratic parties made up of mostly scientists and scholars.
Wu was born in Suzhou, eastern Jiangsu Province, in 1918. He did his undergraduate and master degree studies at the Department of Geography of Zhongyang University from 1936 to 1941. He obtained a PhD at Liverpool University in England in 1948 and then returned to work in China.
In the 1950s, Wu composed the country's first colored map for land resource utilization based on an investigation he did in Nanjing. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked on geographic studies for agricultural development and edited a series of books on agricultural geography.
In 1981, he suggested that the key problem for utilizing land resources was coordinating the development of populations, resources and the environment. Wu had been working on human geography since that time.
He was selected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991. (From Xinhua)
