A number of Chinese experts and scholars—most of them members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—have died in the recent COVID-19 outbreak, including faculty members at Sun Yat-sen University, a major national university in southern China’s Guangdong Province.
On Dec. 27, Sun Yat-sen University sent an obituary saying that He Zikun, a professor at the university engaged in teaching and researching Marxist and Plekhanov’s ideology, died on Dec. 26, at the age of 90 due to illness.
He is a CCP member and served as the director of the Guangdong Marxist Philosophy Research Association and the director of the Guangdong Socialist Dialectics Research Association.
Another who died at 90 is Qiu Hankang, a CCP member and a retired professor in the university’s Department of Chinese Language and Literature. He died on Dec. 18 because of “illness.”
Recent official obituaries of almost all state agencies and public institutions have vaguely claimed that all deaths are due to “illness” and further details are not provided, even if the deaths are caused by COVID-19.
Previous obituaries published by Sun Yat-sen University include other CCP members.
On Dec. 19, Ouyang Lisi, 43, a faculty member in the Human Anatomy Department of the Institute of Medicine, died of “illness.” The obituary called Ouyang “a passionate believer in the CCP’s education.”
On Dec. 16, Cheng Jianding, 49, Sun Yat-sen University’s deputy director of the Forensic Identification Center, deputy director of the Department of Forensic Medicine, and director of the Department of Forensic Pathology, died on Dec. 15 as he was “involved in a traffic incident.”
Cheng also serves as a member of the Party Committee of Zhongshan Medical College of Sun Yat-sen University and was the secretary of the Party Branch of the Department of Forensic Medicine.
On Dec. 10, Jiang Zhiqiang, 40, a CCP member and an associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University’s Institute of Medicine, died of “a sudden illness.”
Jiang’s death shocked many students and faculty, as he had been a host of the campus academic salon at the end of last month, according to the official media Southern Metropolis Daily.
Organ Harvesting at the University Hospital
The First Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, where Peng worked, has been listed by human rights investigators as participating in forced organ harvesting, a practice where people are murdered in order to provide organs for China’s booming organ transplant industry.He Xiaoshun, a member of the Expert Committee of the Human Organ Donation Commission and vice president of the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, said to the Southern Weekly, a state-run media, in March 2010, “The year 2000 was a watershed for the organ transplant industry in China. … The number of liver transplants in 2000 reached 10 times that of 1999; in 2005, the number tripled further [since 2000].”
Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a peaceful meditation practice with five gentle exercises that places emphasis on improving moral character by following the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The CCP began to brutally persecute the practice in 1999 after its numbers had grown to an estimated 100 million adherents in China.
