Liu Binyan, exiled Chinese writer and dissident, died of colon cancer at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. on December 5. He was 80.
Liu, a prominent journalist, was participating in the Nieman program for writers at Harvard
University, when the Tiananmen Square incident occurred. Communist leaders barred his return
to China.
Born the son of a railway worker on Jan. 15, 1925, in Changchun, Liu attended school only
through the ninth grade. He taught himself to read English, Japanese and Russian. He read Karl
Marx, which led him to join the underground Communist Party of China in 1944. Liu began his
career as a teacher in Tianjin and then was a youth worker in Harbin. After the Communists took
power in 1949, he moved to Beijing where he worked as an editor, investigative reporter and
party secretary of the China Youth News for much of the 1950s.
In 1956, Liu published two articles in People's Literature that focused on corruption at a bridge
construction site and on censorship at a newspaper. Within a year, Liu was charged with
counterrevolutionary activities, branded a rightist, ousted from the party and sent to work with
peasants in the fields.
During Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, he was denounced as a Soviet agent and spent eight
years in a labor camp. After rehabilitation, Liu became a reporter for the People's Daily in 1979
until 1987 when he was stripped of party membership anew and again silenced.
When Liu arrived in Los Angeles in 1988 shortly after his second party expulsion. In the United
States, Liu worked briefly as a writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and
wrote articles about justice and politics in China for the Hong Kong press. He also broadcast to
China over the American-funded Radio Free Asia.
In 1990, Liu published A Higher Kind of Loyalty: A Memoir, which was based on a 1985 article
with the same title. But, the work that established Liu as an internationally respected writer was
his People or Monsters? First published in the prestigious Chinese national journal People's
Literature in 1979, it gained wider prestige when it was re-published by Indiana University Press
as the title article in a book-length collection of his work in 1982. The book exposed a corrupt
cashier who became an oppressive party leader in northeastern China. It earned him the nickname
"Liu the Just."
Liu is survived by his wife, Zhu Hong, who lived with him in East Windsor, N.J.; a son, Dahong,
and daughter Xiaoyan, who live in China, and two grandchildren.
(Source: Myrna Oliver, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 8, 2005).