China: Professor kills party official at Fudan University

BEIJING – A professor killed the secretary of the Communist Party in a school of mathematics at the prestigious Chinese university Fudan, the police and school authorities announced.

Police identified the suspect in custody as a 39-year-old professor named Jiang, saying the knife was committed in a crime on a school campus in Shanghai.

The school said in a brief statement that Wang Yongzhen, 49, was killed Monday afternoon, and the department has set up a working group to co-operate fully with the police investigation.

Police said in a statement that Jiang protested against Wang and admitted his guilt. Fudan was the site of a second murder in 2013 when a graduate student poisoned his roommate after a dispute.

Party secretaries are ubiquitous on Chinese campuses, tasked with maintaining ideological purity, preventing the spread of Western concepts of human rights and freedom of speech, and ensuring that students and professors remain loyal to foreigners.

Fudan is ranked as one of the world’s 100 best universities with strong overseas ties, although his ties to China’s ruling Communist Party have sparked controversy.

Several thousand people gathered in the Hungarian capital on Saturday against an agreement with Fudan to open a branch in the city, citing costs and ties to Chinese authoritarian rulers.