eachers from Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) have been devoting themselves to the anti-epidemic academic research and educational work to help fight against the COVID-19, though not involved at the front-line.

Yu Zucheng, an associate professor of SISU’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs, had organised to write the book, Community Public Crisis Guidebook, in about 40 days. The book was published by the end of March. He also completed five papers demanded by CSSCI journals, and eight editorials on community epidemic prevention which were published on newspapers including Social Science Journal and Tuanjie Bao.

Yu pointed out that this epidemic crisis had exposed many problems in China's community governance, especially the failure to extend public crisis emergency management system to the community level. He hoped this book could be instructional for the future development of community public crisis management.

“We focus on the practicality and feasibility of the book, hoping it could provide reference and practice guidance for the future community construction,” he said.

Additionally, Yu also guided his students to think of the problems exposed in this epidemic outbreak through their academic research. He led three postgraduates to complete their journal papers and instructed four postgraduates to write five newspaper articles. Then he integrated those three papers on the anti-epidemic mechanism in Japan to his course Japanese Government and Politics this semester.

"I always believe that teaching and scientific research are complementary," Yu said. "Teaching can often inspire research ideas and provide topics while research outputs add depth and dimension to my teaching."

Another SISU scholar, Tang Bei from the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, attended and addressed at the 56th Munich Security Conference in February, 2020. Tang said when interviewed by Weihui Daily that participating in global health governance and playing a more active role would effectively show China as a responsible major power.

Xu Min, an associate professor from SISU’s School of Japanese Studies, has been translating news from Shanghai’s press release on epidemic prevention into Japanese since February 1, 2020. His works are shown on the website of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government in the Japanese language. Xu has translated more than 90,000 Chinese words into Japanese in 60 days.

Xu said that he was glad to exert his professional skill to help foreigners know what happened in China and in Shanghai,  and to show Shanghai’s cosmopolitan image during the anti-epidemic period.

So far, hundreds of SISU teachers and students have been actively volunteering in foreign services of epidemic prevention.