Liu Binyan

Communist Party of China Dissident 1925–2005 → Died in exile

Reportage writer of People or Monsters, twice expelled from the party

Born in Changchun and raised in Harbin, he joined the Communist Party in 1944. As a reporter and editor at China Youth News after 1949 he caused a nationwide stir in 1956 with “On the Bridge Worksite” and “The Inside Story of Our Newspaper”, exposing bureaucratism and corruption, but was labelled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and expelled from the party. He spent twenty-one years in all in and out of camps from 1957. Freed of the rightist label and readmitted to the party in 1978, he exposed corruption in reportage literature, and People or Monsters, about a corrupt official in Heilongjiang, caused a sensation in 1979. Expelled again in 1987 in the campaign against bourgeois liberalisation, he went to the United States in 1988 and, after denouncing the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, was barred from returning. He died in the United States in 2005.