Liu Binyan

Liu Binyan (; 7 February 1925 – 5 December 2005) was a Chinese author, journalist, and political dissident.

Many of the events in Liu's life are recounted in his memoir, A Higher Kind of Loyalty.

Early life

Liu Binyan, whose family hails from Shandong province, was born in 1925, 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, he joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 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.

Outspoken Critic in Early Years of PRC Liu Binyan published influential critiques of the consequences of Party management in the 1950s. In rapid succession he encountered recognition, approval, criticism, and finally prosecution for crimes against the Party. In October 1955, he acted as the interpreter for visiting Soviet writer Valentin Ovechkin, who later tried to help Liu Binyan by writing a letter to Zhou Enlai. Liu Binyan learned from Ovechkin's style and wrote the work "On the Bridge Worksite".

A Pair of Articles with a Big Impact

In 1956, he published "On the Bridge Worksite" (《在桥梁工地上》 "Zai qiaoliang gongdi shang"), which exposed bureaucratism and corruption, and "The Inside Story of Our Newspaper" ( 《本报内部消息》 "Benbao neibu xiaoxi"), about press control. The two works had a powerful nationwide impact.

According to Liu, "'On the Bridge Construction Site' had been the first piece to criticize the Party itself since Mao Zedong had laid down the dictum in 1942 in his 'Talks at the Yan'an Forum' that writers should 'extol the bright side of life' and 'not expose' the darkness. This followed the publication of "On the Bridge Worksite" and "The Inside Story of Our Newspaper," and expelled from the CCP (see Hundred Flowers Campaign). The campaign against Liu Binyan was closely associated with the campaign against another social critic and author, Wang Meng, who had recently published a highly influential work, "A New Arrival at the Organization Department."

People or Monsters was the first in a series of works describing corruption and social problems, and was noteworthy for its use of fact-based reporting (reportage) in place of pure fiction.

Liu Binyan was again expelled from the CCP in 1987, ). Until the end, he remained an adherent of socialism with a human face, was critical of social inequality and consumerist cynicism in China, and stressed that the CCP, which he had joined as a youth, had many positive achievements before the Maoist crimes and its transformation into the "foul, reactionary force" that it was today.

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