Liu Binyan, the Chinese writer and intellectual who was stranded in the United States by China’s 1989 crackdown on dissidents after the student pro-democracy uprising in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, has died. He was 80.
Mr. Liu died Monday of colon cancer in New Brunswick, N.J., said Cecilia Alvear, who was a Nieman Fellow with Liu at Harvard University.
Then China’s most prominent journalist, Mr. Liu was in Boston participating in the Nieman program for writers when the bloody confrontation between students and the Chinese government occurred.
Communist leaders, frequently at odds with Mr. Liu over his critical writing, seized on the uprising to bar his return to China and force him into exile.
In 1990, Mr. Liu published the autobiographical “A Higher Kind of Loyalty,” based on a 1985 article of the same title. “There are two kinds of loyalties in this world,” he wrote. “One is exposed to risks, while the other is safe.”
But the work that established Mr. Liu as an internationally respected writer was “People or Monsters,” first published in 1979.
Blending the technique of the novelist with the subject matter of the muckraking reporter, “People or Monsters” was a carefully researched expose of a corrupt cashier who becomes an oppressive party leader in northeastern China. The piece helped make Mr. Liu one of China’s best-known and most admired writers and earned him the nickname “Liu the Just.”
Mr. Liu, who taught himself to read English, Japanese and Russian, went on to write a series of novel-length works criticizing systemic local corruption within the Communist Party and the party’s insistence on absolute obedience.
