Wu Zhonghua

Wu Zhonghua (; 27 July 1917 – 19 September 1992), also known as Chung-Hua Wu,

In 1935, he entered the Department of Mechanics of Tsinghua University in Beiping (now Beijing). After the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the university evacuated Beiping and moved south to Changsha, Hunan Province. Together with other students of Tsinghua's mechanics department, he received a year of military training at the newly established Army Mechanized Force School in Hunan. When the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Hunan, his university was forced to evacuate again to Kunming in southwest China, where Tsinghua and several other exiled universities combined their diminished resources to form the temporary National Southwestern Associated University (Lianda). Wu resumed his studies at Lianda, and was hired as a faculty member after graduating in 1940. In 1943, he married Li Minhua, a fellow alumna and physicist at Lianda. which was considered by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as one of the two most important breakthroughs of the 1950s in the development of turbomachinery, together with the invention of computers. In 1954, they resolved to return to China. To avoid suspicion of the US government, the family flew to Britain in August for vacation, and travelled to China through Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, arriving at the end of the year.