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.

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.

A Pair of Articles with a Big Impact

In 1956 he published "On the Bridge Worksite" (???????? "Zai qiaoliang gongdi shang"), which exposed bureaucratism and corruption, and "The Inside Story of Our Newspaper" ( ???????? "Benbao neibu xiaoxi"), about press control. The two works had a powerful nationwide impact among readers.

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 Yanan Forum' that writers should 'extol the bright side of life' and 'not expose' the darkness."

Labeled a "Rightist"

In the year following the publication of "On the Bridge Worksite" and "The Inside Story of Our Newspaper," 1957, Liu was labeled a "rightist" and expelled from the Communist Party (see Hundred Flowers Camapaign). 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."

Interim Years

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.

People or Monsters (??????), about a corrupt official in the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang named Wang Shouxin, created a sensation when it was published in 1979, and became a central element in the effort in China to reflect on and understand the course of Chinese social development, particularly over the course of the Cultural Revolution.

People or Monsters was widely read in China, and was broadly re-distributed following initial publication. "What was powerful about Liu's piece was it universality: everyone in China knew people like Wang Shouxin, and it made everyone think of all those who had not been brought to justice."

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.

People or Monsters , ???????"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 Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he was barred from returning to China and never saw his 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 (nonetheless, he was reported to "detest American capitalism" and expressed dismay at a certain Chinese dissident's support for the Iraq war). 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 Communist Party of China, 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 on December 5, 2005 from complications due to colon cancer. He is survived by his wife, Zhu Hong.