Liu Binyan

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.

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

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.

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 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."

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."

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