Liu Daoyu, "Eternal President of Wuhan University," dies at 92

Today, China’s universities are often held up as a triumph. Chinese-trained talent fills America’s AI labs, and the country now tops the Nature Index of leading scientific journals. To many observers, the conclusion writes itself: China has built a world-class university system.

Success—or the appearance of it—has smothered debate. For more than two decades, the sharpest critiques of China’s universities have gone largely unanswered. The loudest, and most singular, belonged to Liu Daoyu, the former president of Wuhan University, who died on November 7, 2025. He is mourned as the school’s “eternal president”—a phrase that says less about nostalgia than about the present. The implication is pointed: Chinese universities are run as bureaucratic outposts rather than communities of scholarship.

Liu was no outsider. Born in 1933, he was a decorated member of the Communist Party of China who helped organise the landmark 1977 symposium chaired by Deng Xiaoping that restored the national college entrance examination and reopened intellectual life after the Cultural Revolution. That decision reshaped the fate of millions and remains one of the most consequential events in modern Chinese education. It was also the beginning of Liu’s long public devotion to education as a national calling, not a bureaucratic chore.

He became most closely associated with Wuhan University’s “golden years” in the 1980s. He pushed through a series of reforms that were then unheard of on the Chinese mainland: a credit system, double-major programmes, minor systems, flexible transfers between departments, and admissions for students from other universities. They landed like stones in still water, sending ripples across a higher-education system that was rigid, hierarchical, and allergic to experimentation. Liu placed the development of students’ individual potential—rather than ideological conformity—at the centre of the university’s mission. Wuhan University briefly became an academic oasis: open, restless, inventive. In a decade when China longed for modernity, Liu offered not just administration but imagination.

One anecdote from his tenure still circulates. During a grassroots election for the National People’s Congress, a law student announced he would run—against a list of approved candidates. Some laughed; others braced for trouble. Liu quietly supported him. The student won with more than 7,000 votes. It was a tiny glimpse of civic possibility inside a university campus. Such moments have not been seen for a long time.

In a 2012 interview with Southern Weekly, Liu was asked which achievement he valued most. He replied:

“Creating

...