COVID-19 infections in China surged in early December 2022. The sudden increase in celebrity deaths raised doubts over the country’s officially-announced COVID death toll. Since December, at least 30 professors at Renmin University have passed away, 29 of whom were members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including former university president Huang Da, Marxist theorist Lu Guishan, and Xu Zhengfan, one of the so-called “founding fathers” of the Marxist theory of the CCP.
Huang Da, born in 1925, died in Beijing on Feb. 18, 2023, at the age of 98. He served as Vice President of Renmin University from 1983, was the first Dean of the university’s School of Economics in 1988, and was president of the university from November 1991 to June 1994, when he began receiving special allowances from the State Council. He also served as an advisor to the Social Science Committee of the Ministry of Education, was an honorary president of the China Society of Finance, and was a member of the first Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China.
