Liu Binyan, 80, Dissident Journalist
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Liu Binyan, who died yesterday at 80, was a leading Chinese journalist and dissident who was repeatedly punished and expelled from the Communist Party before going into exile in America in 1989, at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Liu was member of the revolutionary generation of Chinese communists, and his dissidence came from a position firmly rooted in the party as he crusaded against the party’s corruption in newspapers. He was first branded a traitor in 1956, and was twice rehabilitated, only to go back to exposing corruption as periods of official reform and openness became vitiated.
In 1979, Liu published “People or Monsters,” an excoriating account of corruption in the northeastern Heilongjiang province that caused a sensation in China. Now the nation’s most lionized reformer, Liu in 1985 published an article titled “A Second Kind of Loyalty,” suggesting obedience to authority might be trumped by conscience. Party officials again silenced Liu, who subsequently accepted a position at Harvard and never returned to China.
In America, Liu published “A Higher Kind of Loyalty,” “Tell the World: What Happened in China” (both 1990). He lectured extensively, and maintained a gimlet-eyed view of politics back home, which he thought continued to be dominated by venal politicians lording over an apathetic populace.
A Princeton East Asian Studies professor, Perry Link, then teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote of hosting Liu shortly before Tiananmen, “[I] had hosted many distinguished Chinese visitors. Liu was the only one of my guests who showed no interest in Disneyland.”
Liu was born in Changchun, an industrial city that today calls itself “The Spring City of the North.” He told interviewers that his parents were relatively liberal and did not stress Confucian ideas about respecting elders and teachers. He was nicknamed “Big Head” for his disproportionately massive cranium; the phrase also meant “gullible” in the local argot.
Liu dropped out of school after the ninth grade, but continued to read intensively and taught himself Russian and English. In 1944, he joined the Communist Party, then an underground movement. In 1951, he began working as a reporter for the China Youth News, a nationwide party newspaper. Emboldened by Mao Zedong’s “Hundred Flowers” campaign of 1957, when the official policy was to encourage criticism of authority, Binyan published two pieces of fiction criticizing censorship and corruption. He was ousted from the party and sentenced to hard labor in the countryside. The period of exile stretched for 22 years. A brief respite in the late 1960s quickly ended when he was denounced by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. He went back to raising picks and baking bricks.
Liu’s final rehabilitation came in 1979. Returning to journalism as a reporter for the People’s Daily, Liu soon published “People or Monsters?” He was back in the saddle, his crusade against corruption at a higher tilt than ever. According to Mr. Link, writing in Time magazine, Liu was “the mainland’s most admired writer.” Authorities cracked down on him for the last time in 1987.
After a fellowship at Harvard, Liu headed the scholarly Princeton China Initiative, where he edited the “China Focus” newsletter. In 1997, he wrote in the magazine Index on Censorship, “The government has entirely lost its moral authority to rule and seems even to lack confidence in its own legitimacy.” Yet he seemed to have little confidence that the people would rise up and create a thriving democracy. “I never thought that the temptation of money and goods could have such an impact on Chinese people,” he told Human Rights Watch in 1999.
Liu Binyan
Born in Changchun, China, in 1925; died December 5 at the Robert Wood Johnson-University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., of colon cancer; survived by his wife, Zhu Hong; two children, and two grandsons.