Ricerc@Sapienza

Il contributo riasume le diverse ricerche e scambi culturali effettuati con diverse università della China tra cui Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, Southeast University in Nanjing, Tongji University in Shanghai and Tianjin University.

This book intends to give a contribution to an urgent issue, that concerns the presence of the past in the actual contemporary China, involved in a rapid development that risks to erase the traces of its millenary urban history. The town of Anhai, in Quanzhou city metropolitan area, presents a wide and various urban heritage, typical of Fujian: extensive fabric of traditional, red brick courtyard houses goes together with the presence of some important monuments, among which the ancient Anping bridge is the most relevant.

The experience recounted in this text is that of an international design Workshop held in the autumn of 2015 between Rome and Nanjing, and that involved instructors, PhD candidates, and students from three different faculties: Sapienza University of Rome, Southeast University in Nanjing, Tianjin University in Tianjing.

Italy and China are two countries that conserve many parts of territory that are essentially agricultural, with the populations strongly rooted to the idea of belonging to the place. This sense of identity descends in both cases from the small scale of the individual inhabited settlements, and this is in spite of the enormous scale of China’s urban settlements.

The introductory section of this essay offers an assessment of the conferences and seminars held for First World War centenary in China, stressing the nationalistic elements of these celebrations. Then, the investigation focuses on the innovative contributions provided by the studies of the well-known scholar from Hong Kong University, Xu Guoqi.

The essay first takes into consideration the shift in the balance of power in the Far East since the end of the Cold War. It focuses on the changes that have taken place in the Pacific from the Obama era to the Trump presidency, especially from the point of view of the so-called “Thucydides” and “Churchill” Traps. Within such a framework, it discusses the core reasons for the rivalry between the Popular Republic of China and the United States, as well as the theory of a clash between the two powers that is imminent and inevitable.

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