Chinese Journalist Punished in Crackdown to Teach at UCLA

Liu Binyan, the muckraking journalist whose expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party was a key event in a crackdown on intellectual freedom early last year, will leave here today and spend the next 14 months at UCLA and Harvard.

Granting permission to Liu to travel abroad appears to mark his partial rehabilitation and to reflect the emergence over the last few months of a somewhat more relaxed atmosphere for Chinese intellectual and cultural life.

Liu, 63, an investigative reporter for the official party newspaper People’s Daily, is a hero to many Chinese. But he still has sharp critics among party and government leaders who fear his outspoken style, his scathing attacks on corruption and his advocacy of democratic reforms. He is still officially viewed as someone who, with his frank criticism of Chinese politics and society, went beyond the bounds of permissible behavior for a party member.

“Some people think: ‘Why are they letting you out?’ ” Liu said Thursday in an interview. “ ‘Isn’t it that they hope you won’t come back? Or that you will make mistakes overseas?’ ”

He said he believes that the authorities have granted him permission to travel because “they think it has benefits for them.” It shows, he said, that “the Chinese government is enlightened.”

Liu said he will teach a course in contemporary Chinese literature and society at UCLA during April and May. Beginning in September, he will take part in Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship program for mid-career journalists.

Liu was one of three prominent intellectuals ousted from the Communist Party early last year in a campaign against “bourgeois liberalization”--advocacy of Western concepts of capitalism and democracy--that was undertaken in a backlash against pro-democracy student demonstrations.

Liu said some of his supporters have suggested that it might be best for him to stay abroad.

“But more people think I should come back,” he said, “and I most definitely will come back.”

Publication of four books of his writings was delayed while he was under political attack but are now scheduled to be published in the next few months, Liu said. The books include three collections of articles and stories, plus a book entitled “Conversations With Young People,” he said.

Liu, who visited the United States briefly in 1982, said he would like now to write a book about the United States. He also is interested in writing about consumer advocate Ralph Nader, he said.