South Korean Police Say a Lecturer Killed a Chinese Student to Keep Their Relationship Secret
Police in Gyeongsan, South Korea have transferred the suspected killer of a 25-year-old Chinese graduate student to prosecutors, saying he dismembered her body and staged her disappearance because she threatened to reveal their relationship to her university.
South Korean police delivered their fullest account yet of the killing of Wenwen, a 25-year-old Chinese graduate student whose disappearance in late August became one of the most closely followed stories on Chinese social media. On September 4, the Gyeongsan police station transferred the suspect — Zheng Changsheng, a 31-year-old Chinese national who taught anatomy as a university lecturer — to prosecutors on five charges, including murder and the destruction, abandonment and concealment of a corpse.
According to the findings police released alongside the transfer, Zheng strangled Wenwen in his apartment on the morning of August 20 after the two argued and she said she would tell the university about their relationship. He told investigators he feared that the relationship becoming known would cost him his teaching job. What followed, police say, was a deliberate effort to erase her: he destroyed her body and scattered the remains across five separate locations in Gyeongsan, Gyeongju, Sangju, Daegu and Gunpo — dumps, mountainsides, a riverside — while hiding part of them at home. He then reported her as a missing person to misdirect the investigation, and dressed in her clothes while carrying her phone to Dongdaegu station to create the impression she had left the area on her own.
Police concluded that the two had been in a relationship, backing Zheng's own account with physical evidence and polygraph results. The finding revises the picture from when the suspect was first arrested in late August, when the killing was linked to a marriage dispute. A psychopathy assessment scored Zheng below the Korean threshold for the diagnosis, though two criminal profilers administered the test only after he first refused it.
The documents released on September 4 also filled in a quieter, earlier chapter. In autumn 2023, several Chinese female students at the university where Zheng then taught reported him for pursuing them — one said he suggested she come to his home when she had questions about her thesis, and hinted after rejection that he could delay or block her graduation. The school issued a verbal warning through his supervisor, and he kept messaging. The victim herself had taken his course. Police say they are now investigating whether other students were targeted, and whether his tenure as a lecturer involved other offences.
On Weibo, where the case has run for two weeks, the police findings landed amid an argument about how to talk about the dead. Some users responded to the relationship finding with grim jokes about staying single; others pushed back against any framing that put the victim on trial. "Former lovers? The woman is already gone, and no one alive can corroborate what he says," one commenter wrote. "Whatever the relationship was, this man destroyed this woman — that is the fact." Others asked readers to "keep their eyes on the perpetrator, not on speculation about the victim."
Police say the search for Wenwen's remains continues, and that they have arranged counselling, a public defender, and help with funeral and travel costs for her family in China. Whether the university's earlier, toothless response to its own students' complaints becomes part of the prosecution's story is the question the case now carries.