Liu Binyan Dies; Exiled Chinese Journalist

"I had always tried to communicate with workers and peasants when I was traveling on trains to assignment," he once told the Los Angeles Times. "But I always found it very difficult, because we did not speak the same language or have the same interests.

"But after that experience, I learned what the life of the poor people is like, just like the Russian writers I admired. It was the first time I was able to see directly how peasants were living and working in China. I was very surprised, for example, to learn that they often didn't even have cooking oil."

Reinstated as a Communist in the late 1970s, he resumed his newspaper career, at the official People's Daily, and even managed some investigative work. It culminated in "People or Monsters?" His expose of kickbacks and other underhand methods of business could have been set in any region in the country, and thousands of readers sent him letters and made personal visits in the hope he would solve their problems.

There was an expectation that he might use his reputation for fearlessness and incorruptibility to seek public office. However, he shunned the cult of personality that arose amid his book.

If he had grown too popular to send away for further reeducation, he was, in a matter of years, fired from his job and again kicked out of the party on government orders. With the help of Salisbury, who by then was retired, Mr. Liu managed a trip abroad during this period in the late 1980s. Soon after came the Chinese national crackdown on social eruptions, most vividly remembered for the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings in Beijing.

Mr. Liu saw the event on television and his subsequent public comments were decidedly unwelcome to the Chinese government. Thereafter in mandatory exile, he was greeted as a hero by supporters in the United States.

Perry Link, a Princeton University professor of East Asian studies, wrote in Time magazine about meeting Mr. Liu then: "I was teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the time and had hosted many distinguished Chinese visitors. Liu was the only one of my guests who showed no interest in Disneyland.

"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 3 a.m., night after night, devouring everything from the musings of Malcolm X to analyses of Eastern European socialism."

After receiving a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, Mr. Liu briefly was a writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He also lectured at Princeton University for most of the 1990s and was involved in the Princeton China Initiative, a research and education organization unaffiliated with the university.

Mr. Liu continued to write about justice and politics in China. He wrote a memoir, "A Higher Kind of Loyalty" (1990), among other books.

Survivors include his wife of 54 years, Zhu Hong of East Windsor, N.J., whom he called his "guardian angel"; two children, Liu Dahong of Shanghai and Liu Xiaoyan of Beijing; and two grandsons.

Despite everything, Mr. Liu remained a believer in socialist ideals and showed contempt for many of the changes labeled reforms in recent years. He viewed them as little more than methods for the wealthy and powerful to profit at the expense of most others.

Well-connected in China, he sent letters to President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, among other top leaders, asking for permission to return to China as his cancer worsened. He was certain the letters were read, but he never received a reply.