[Beren]

China: Professor killed party official at Fudan University

A security guard stands at the gate to the campus of Fudan University in Shanghai, China on April 28, 2017.
A professor killed the Communist Party secretary at the school of mathematics at China's prestigious Fudan
University on Monday, June 7, 2021, police and school authorities said. (Chinatopix via AP)

Wed, June 9, 2021, 5:01 AM · 1 min read

BEIJING (AP) — A professor killed the Communist Party secretary at the school of mathematics at China's prestigious Fudan University, police and school authorities said.

Police identified the suspect in custody as a 39-year-old professor whose surname is Jiang, saying he used a knife in committing the crime on the school campus in Shanghai.

The school said in a brief statement that Wang Yongzhen, 49, was killed on Monday afternoon and the department had established a working group to fully cooperate with the police investigation.

Police said in their statement that Jiang bore a grudge against Wang and has admitted his guilt. Fudan was the scene of another murder in 2013 when a graduate student poisoned his roommate after a dispute.

Party secretaries are ubiquitous on Chinese campuses, charged with maintaining ideological purity, preventing the dissemination of Western concepts of human rights and free speech, and ensuring students and faculty remain loyal to the party.

Fudan is ranked as one of the world's top 100 universities with strong overseas connections, although its connections to China's ruling Communist Party have attracted controversy.

Several thousand people rallied in Hungary’s capital on Saturday against an agreement with Fudan to open a branch in the city, citing the cost and ties to China’s authoritarian rulers.

It's interesting news to me because Fudan wants to come to Budapest, capital of Hungary (after George Soros's Central European University was pushed out by the government), which makes a lot of political stir here, partly because Hungary's supposed to finance the project by taking out a $2 billion loan from the Chinese, adding to the $1.8 billion loan already taken out from them for the construction of the controversial Budapest-Belgrade railroad.

Budapest protest against China's Fudan University campus

[Rugoz]

I thought the whole thing was canceled/delayed.

Why should the Hungarian state pay for a Chinese university in the first place. Orban must be really desperate to turn his people into sheeple.

[Beren]

I thought the whole thing was canceled/delayed.

Now the government says they don't mind if there's going to be a referendum on it.

Why should the Hungarian state pay for a Chinese university in the first place.

I guess the idea is that it will generate lots of income in the future, however, we didn't have to finance the CEU coming here. It didn't bother the government that they generated income as well, they pushed them out anyway.

Orban must be really desperate to turn his people into sheeple.

He's rather desperate to suck up to the Chinese.



The guy with him is our minister of foreign affairs and trade, he's mostly responsible for handling and fostering eastern relations.

However, I really wonder if what happened at Fudan in China and why, I don't know if how academic life in China is.

[Rugoz]

I guess the idea is that it will generate lots of income in the future, however, we didn't have to finance the CEU coming here. It didn't bother the government that they generated income as well, they pushed them out anyway.

Fudan might be more of a technical university and maybe have a higher budget, if funded by China.

But yeah, obviously Orban likes it because he doesn't expect much criticism from such a place.

[Beren]

Fudan might be more of a technical university and maybe have a higher budget, if funded by China.

But yeah, obviously Orban likes it because he doesn't expect much criticism from such a place.

In my opinion he rather means to fundamentally change Hungary's academic landscape and orientation, there have been many changes regarding Hungarian universities and colleges as well. There's publicly and officially supposed to be an opening to the east anyway, they're not really shy about it.

[ThirdTerm]

Police said in their statement that Jiang bore a grudge against Wang and has admitted his guilt. Fudan was the scene of another murder in 2013 when a graduate student poisoned his roommate after a dispute.

The victim, Wang Yongzhen, was in the process of firing lecturer Jiang Wenhua from his teaching post. A lecturer needs to get promoted to the rank of associate professor within four years, while publishing many journal articles to attract government funding, or he will get fired. Chinese universities work on the same academic principles as British universities, even under Communist rule. But the main purpose of making the first Chinese university campus in the European Union is disseminating Communist propaganda as the charter requires to represent the worldview of the Chinese Communist Party. Hungary is becoming a Chinese satellite state. It hosts Huawei's largest supply center outside of China and took a $2 billion loan from China's Exim Bank as part of China's global Belt and Road initiative.

A science professor who gave only the surname Luo blamed a recruitment policy among top Chinese universities, which try to attract overseas academics with jobs back home in China, but then fire them if they don't attract enough research funding.

"These universities, especially the lower-ranking ones in the western part of the country, will hire new PhDs as adjuncts on the basis that they will be demoted to lecturer if they fail to get promoted to associate professor level within four years," Luo said.

"[Some schools] will fire them if they can't attract National Science Foundation funding within six years of starting in post, because that effectively means they won't make associate professor," he said.

A lecturer surnamed Liu said the policies were putting huge pressure on academic staff, which in turn encourages plagiarism.

"It's all about how many journal articles you can get published, and how much of your research is a national priority topic," Liu said.

"But in China, scholar without sufficient clout or resources find it very hard to get published or to attract funding," he said. "It's pretty impossible to achieve without those things."

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/ ... 50654.html

[Fasces]

I thought the whole thing was canceled/delayed.

Why should the Hungarian state pay for a Chinese university in the first place. Orban must be really desperate to turn his people into sheeple.

It is very common for universities to build other campuses internationally. NYU has a campus in Shanghai. AU has campuses all over the Middle East and Europe. Westerners are really becoming insane McCarthyists, finding evil behind every innocuous blade of grass.

[Rugoz]

It is very common for universities to build other campuses internationally. NYU has a campus in Shanghai. AU has campuses all over the Middle East and Europe. Westerners are really becoming insane McCarthyists, finding evil behind every innocuous blade of grass.

Did you read my post? I find it curious that the Hungarian state pays for it, at least for its construction. $2bn is not exactly peanuts.