Liu Binyan

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Liu Binyan (Chinese:刘宾雁 pinyin: Liú Bīnyàn, February 7, 1925-December 5, 2005) was a Chinese author and journalist, as well as a political dissident.

Liu Binyan, whose family hails from Shandong province, was born in 1925, on the fifteenth of the first month of the lunar calendar, in the city of Changchun, Jilin Province. He grew up in Harbin in Heilongjiang province, where he went to school until the ninth grade, after which he had to withdraw for lack of tuition money. He persisted in reading voraciously, especially works about World War II, and in 1944 joined the Communist Party of China. After 1949 he worked as a reporter and editor for China Youth News and began a long career of writing rooted in an iron devotion to social ideals, an affection for China's ordinary people, and an insistence on honest expression even at the cost of great personal sacrifice.

In 1956 he published 《在桥梁工地上》 "Zai qiaoliang gongdi shang" [On the Bridge Worksite]," which exposed bureaucratism and corruption, and 《本报内部消息》 "Benbao neibu xiaoxi" [The Inside Story of Our Newspaper], about press control. The two works had a powerful nationwide impact among readers, but in the next year, 1957, Liu was labeled a "rightist" and expelled from the Communist Party (see Hundred Flowers Camapaign). After being rehabilitated in the 1960s, he again fell out of favor in 1969 and was condemned to a laogai detention camp, where he spent eight years. After being rehabilitated again, he built up a sound reputation as a reformer and a corruption watchdog. From 1957 on, he spent roughly 21 years in and out of labor camps.

In 1978, after the "rightist" label was removed, Liu was re-admitted to the Communist Party but continued, in even starker terms than before, to write "reportage literature" about injustices and the sufferings of ordinary people. 《人妖之间》"Renyao zhijian" [People or Monsters?] (1979), 《第二种忠诚》"Di-er zhong zhongcheng" [A Second Kind of Loyalty] (1985) and other essays made him a household name among Chinese readers and cemented his reputation as "China's conscience." In 1985, when the Chinese Writers' Association was allowed (for the first and last time) to elect its own leaders, Liu Binyan received the second-highest number of votes to Ba Jin, the surviving May-Fourth era writer.

In January 1987, as part of Deng Xiaoping's crackdown on "bourgeois liberalism," Liu Binyan was again expelled from the Communist Party. In spring of 1988 he came to the United States for teaching and writing; then, after publicly denouncing the Chinese government for the Beijing massacre and nationwide crackdown in June, 1989, he was barred from returning to China and never saw his beloved homeland again. Although largely isolated from his Chinese readers, he continued to write about China where his sources often came from interviewing visitors from China.

He published articles critical of Chinese corruption for the Hong Kong media, and offered commentary for the U.S. government funded Radio Free Asia.

He died in East Windsor, New Jersey on December 5, 2005 from complications due to colon cancer. He's survived by his wife, Zhu Hong.