In April, just after the Qingming Festival — a traditional time in China for honoring ancestors and visiting the graves of loved ones — a video interview with Liu Liang, a professor in the Department of Forensic Medicine at Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, went viral online.
Liu has personally performed more than 4,000 autopsies and taken part in over 7,000 forensic examinations during a 43-year career, earning a reputation as one of the most seasoned figures in China’s forensic field. When the interviewer asked him directly whether human beings have souls, he answered without hesitation: “Absolutely.”
Now 65, Liu began his career as a clinical doctor before moving into forensic medicine. He was originally a thorough materialist, shaped by the Chinese Communist Party system in which he was trained. At university, he studied anatomy, pathology, and the logic of evidentiary chains with scientific rigor. His daily work was to examine the dead with scalpels and microscopes and provide answers for the courts or for grieving families.
He has seen bodies shattered in falls from high buildings, “perfect suicides” carefully staged by highly intelligent criminals, and the mutilated remains left behind in family murder cases. He has even had to dissect the bodies of people he knew. On the surface, someone who spends his life working so closely with death should be the most convinced that death is simply the end.
Yet after more than four decades of confronting death up close, Liu says his thinking gradually changed.
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