Liu Binyan Buried in Beijing, Finally

Five years after his death in America, the famous journalist and dissident Liu Binyan finally found his resting place in a cemetery in a Beijing suburb.

His tombstone bears his name and birth/death years. However, the words he wished to be presented, "this Chinese laying here, he had done what he should do and said what he should say", is absent. Apparently that was not allowed by the authority.

People of 1989: Wang Ruowang

The outspoken author Wang Ruowang belonged to the older generation who had joined the Communist revolution in China in the very earlier days. In fact, he got himself in jail for that when he was barely a teenager, sentenced to 10 years under the Nationalist regime in 1934. Fortunately he was released only 3 years later. He immediately made a trip to Yan'an, the then heartland of the communists, and joined the Chinese Communist Party. He was only 19 years old then.

Yan'an did not turn out to be the holy place he had dreamed about. He got himself in trouble quickly there due to his outspokenness and saw one of his friends killed during an ideological purge.

In the 1950s, he was labeled as a "rightist" for some of the articles he published. He was expelled from the Party and sent to countryside to reform through labor. That did not work on him however, for he got into trouble again in 1968 by speaking negatively about the top leadership. This time he was sent to jail for 4 years. It's his second time in prison, but first one under the communist rule.

Like most of his compatriots, Wang Ruowang was rehabilitated in the late 1970s with Deng Xiaoping's reform. He was re-admitted into the Party and assigned to be a deputy editor of a literary magazine in Shanghai. And he started writing again.

Wang Ruowang published a series of novels and articles in the liberating 1980s. But it was an article he published in 1986 that got the most attention, as it was titled One-Party Dictatorship Can Only Lead to Tyranny.

So in January of 1987, Wang Ruowang was named one of the symbols of "Bourgeois Liberalization" movement, along with Fang Lizhi and Liu Binyan. [However, there are credible indications that he was named because of a mistake by Deng Xiaoping.] He was once again expelled from the Party. He was also forbidden to travel abroad.

In early 1989, Wang Ruowang marched in the street of Shanghai in April to protest the purge of newspaper World Economic Herald, an early crackdown engineered by then mayor Jiang Zemin. He marched again in May to support the student hunger strike in Beijing.

After the Tiananmen Massacre, Wang Ruowang was once again put in jail for his earlier actions--the third time he saw prison. He was already 71 years old.

He was finally allowed to travel abroad in 1992 and settled in America. He traveled extensively in North America in an attempt to consolidate the hopelessly fragmented oversea dissident movement. His effort failed miserably.

He passed away on December 19, 2001 in a hospital in New York City. He was 83.

People of 1989

People of 1989: Liu Binyan

The famous journalist Liu Binyan was not in Beijing during the 1989 student movement. In fact, he was out of the country in the United States on a lecturing tour. He watched the movement on television and became a prominent oversea voice.

Born in 1925, Liu Binyan spent his childhood in Northeast China under the occupation of the imperial Japanese army. He had to drop out of school after ninth grade because of poverty but he managed to acquire a lifelong passion for books on his own. Later, the young Liu Binyan joined the underground Communist Party in the 1940s.

After the communists took power, Liu Binyan worked as an editor, investigative reporter, and Party secretary of the China Youth News. It was in that position that he first ran into trouble with the authority in the mid-1950s. His budding work on exposing corruption in the "new China" led him to be branded as a "rightist". He was expelled from the Party and sent to a mountain village to be reformed through hard labor.

Liu Binyan's literate career finally took off a couple of decades later, when he was redeemed in 1978, at the cusp of Deng Xiaoping's reform. He was readmitted into the Communist Party became a special reporter for the People's Daily. Throughout the 1980s, he published a series of investigative reports that gained national fame and international attention. His exposure of corrupt officials struck a chord with the common folks and he was praised as "China's conscience." However, his work also tended to blur the line between facts and fiction, a trend deeply rooted in China's literate tradition.

His outspokenness also irked Deng Xiaoping. In January of 1987 and after a series of student protests, Liu Binyan was once again expelled from the Communist Party as a symbol of the socalled "Bourgeois Liberation" movement, along with Fang Lizhi and Wang Ruowan.

A year later, Liu Binyan was allowed to travel abroad. When he was teaching at UCLA, his host Perry Link remembers him as the only scholar from China who showed no interest in Disneyland. Instead, "for days, his favorite hangout was a used-book store run by the Salvation Army. Already self-taught in English as well as Russian, he bought piles of paperbacks for 25 cents apiece and read them until 3am, night after night, devouring everything from the musings of Malcolm X to analyses of Eastern European socialism."

In 1989, Liu Binyan watched the student movement from across the ocean. While his direct influence to the movement was limited, he became a tireless cheerleader on the American media and always ready to spill out inside information he gathered from "his friends in Beijing" and his own optimistic predictions, many of which proved questionable at best.

During the later years of his life as he battled cancer, Liu Binyan lobbied for returning to his motherland by writing letters to a series of Chinese leaders including Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Wen Jiabao. His appeal fell into deaf ears. He finally passed away on December 5, 2005, in a hospital in New Jersey. He was 80.

Despite his dissent, Liu Binyan remained a loyalist to his ideals which included his belief in the "true" Marxism and socialism. Through one of his most famous works, he named it a "second kind of loyalty" -- being both loyal and truthful at the same time.

He had told his wife that he wished to have the following words in his tombstone: "this Chinese laying here, he had done what he should do and said what he should say."

UPDATE: Five years after his death, his ashes were finally buried in Beijing.


People of 1989

NYT Archive 1989: Second Day of Martial Law

The much extended coverage of the "Upheaval in China" continued in New York Times on May 22, 1989. It included a cautious call by President George H. W. Bush for Chinese to "stand up for what you believe in". The journalist Liu Binyan(刘宾雁), who was in the States, spread a few rumors. Oversea Chinese students continued their own demonstrations to support their compatriots at home, in Hong Kong and New York.

There was also a pro-democratic demonstration at Muscow, led Boris Yeltsin and Andrei Sakharov. But it was unrelated to what was happening in China.

Meanwhile, in Beijing:

Workers and students blocked new advances by army convoys today, preventing a military crackdown on China's democracy movement from taking effect, and several dozen top legislators quietly began preparing a strategy to revoke martial law.

There was exhilaration as well as exhaustion on central Tiananmen Square as dawn broke this morning, for many of the tens of thousands of students occupying the square had earlier written their wills after widespread rumors that brutal repression would begin during the night.

While many still fear that there will be violence, there is a sense of triumph in the capital that ordinary citizens have been able to prevent the Government from carrying out martial law more than two days after Prime Minister Li Peng ordered it.

The optimism had obviously strengthened students' resolve,

'Tiananmen Square has become a holy spot for Chinese democracy,'' a student leader, Wang Dan, told the crowd today. ''If we stay here longer, we will contribute more to China's democratization and increase our influence. If we withdraw, we will let down the citizens who have defended us. We will stay until our victory.''

As the movement turned against Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping, NYT also profiled "eight elders", senior retired or semi-retired leaders, who were much closer with Deng Xiaoping in age than either Zhao Ziyang or Li Peng, who might ultimately decide the outcome of this crisis.