Liu, Binyan 1925–2005

(Liu Pin-yen)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born January 15, 1925, in Changchun, China; died of colon cancer, December 5, 2005, in New Brunswick, NJ. Journalist and author. In his Communist-dominated homeland, Liu was a journalist who spoke out against corruption in China until, fired from his newspaper job, he immigrated to the United States. His father's knowledge of Russian led the young Liu to read the works of such greats as Leo Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky. He consequently developed empathy for the working classes and vowed to one day write about their plight. With only a ninth-grade education, he found work as a teacher in Tianjin during the mid-1940s, and until 1950 was a youth worker in Harbin. He managed to be hired in 1951 as a reporter for the China Youth Daily, where he began to write stories about inefficiencies and corruption in government. Eventually, his work drew the ire of China's Communist officials, and he was sent to "reeducation" camps for most of the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, Liu was given backbreaking work and was not allowed to see his family for years. However, he considered the experience an important one because it allowed him to see firsthand the conditions under which the poor in China lived. Eventually permitted to return to his job as a reporter, Liu was put on the staff of the government-run People's Daily. His concern for social welfare soon resurfaced, and he once again began reporting on government misconduct. This culminated with his book People or Monsters?, which was published in the United States in 1981. The book made Liu a hero among the Chinese masses, and the government therefore did not dare to send him back to a labor camp. In 1981, 1985, and 1987, he won his country's national award for literary reportage before being thrown out of the Communist Party; Liu also lost his job at the People's Daily in 1987. For the next two years he was writer and vice chair of the China Writer's Association. By the late 1980s, Liu had also become well known to American journalists and academics because of his work. Former New York Times editor Harrison E. Salisbury managed to arrange for Liu to travel to the United States just as the Chinese government was beginning new crackdowns on protestors. Liu was named a Neiman fellow at Harvard in 1988, and from 1989–90 was a writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He would also be a guest scholar at the Wilson Center from 1990 to 1991, and a visiting scholar at Princeton University. Despite Liu's criticism of his own government, he was still a socialist at heart and had a poor view of the money-motivated capitalist system in America. He often wrote back to China, requesting that he be allowed to return to his homeland, but was never granted permission. Among Liu's other books are the autobiography A Higher Kind of Loyalty (1990) and China's Crisis, China's Hope (1990).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Liu, Binyan, A Higher Kind of Loyalty, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1990.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, December 6, 2005, p. B10.

New York Times, December 6, 2005, p. C21.

Times (London, England), December 15, 2005, p. 71.

Washington Post, December 6, 2005, p. B5.