An Interlude for an Outcast : China’s Marxist Gadfly Liu Binyan Finds Scholarly Haven From His Nation’s Turmoil

History has not been especially kind to Liu Binyan.

He is an author and muckraking journalist. But for much of his adult life he was not allowed to write, report or publish. Instead he planted rice, wheat and corn, made bricks, built houses, swept floors and cleaned toilets.

He is a dedicated Marxist. But he has been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party--twice. During China’s Cultural Revolution, he was even accused of spying for the Soviet Union.

Yet Liu has--in his own way--prospered. He is famous and respected--even adored--by many in his own country for his exposes of corruption in the Communist Party and his steadfast support of the people against the blundering machinery of the state.

As well as being a hero in his own country, Liu’s hard-won reputation as an independent, uncompromising critic has made him world-renowned.

When he was thrown out of the party for the second time early last year in a clampdown on free-thinking intellectuals in China, it was a global story. At the time, one Western expert interpreted the attack on Liu as a warning to all of China’s intellectuals, a technique known as “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.”

Now, in a rare interlude of relative calm and freedom, former teen-age revolutionary Liu, 63, has come to the United States to teach and study for the next 14 months. On the first leg of a journey that will take him to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, Liu is spending 2 1/2 months at UCLA conducting a class in contemporary Chinese literature.

Compared with his harsh earlier life, Liu’s current circumstances apparently are like a scholar’s paradise.

“After 1957 (when he was first thrown out of the party) I couldn’t write anymore and I didn’t have much hope to be a writer again,” he recalled in an interview. “I went to the countryside to work with the peasants, but I did not drop my studies. I studied books on philosophy, theories on literature and social science.”

Liu, who previously visited here in 1982, and his wife, Zhu Hong, a former editor of children’s books, have been living in a sparsely furnished apartment in the heart of Westwood for about two weeks.

Clearly transient, they have made little impact on their temporary home. A portable stereo sat in the middle of the dining room table. Chinese language books, some marked with foil from Liu’s cigarette packages, were stacked on coffee tables and end tables. The compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, apparently Liu’s major purchase of this trip so far, was tucked in a corner of the living room floor. (On his first visit here, Liu reportedly haunted used book stores, buying the works of C. Wright Mills and other American Marxists. In the interview, Liu remembered that he had shipped 26 boxes of books back to China. Six boxes were lost and he has never had time to read many from the surviving part of the shipment.)

But while Liu, who was unable to finish high school, has taught himself to read, but not speak, English--as well as Russian and Japanese--will splurge on a dictionary, it’s soon evident that he is not crazy about one facet of Western consumerism.

“The advertisements are terrible, both in television and in newspapers,” he said jokingly through his wife who also is his interpreter. “We have advertisements (in China) and I think they’re too much. But in the U.S. they are much, much too much. I dislike the ones that interrupt the news and movies the most. . . . I think it’s a great waste to society to print so many of these advertisements that are thrust into your mailbox and everywhere. A lot of newspapers here are very big, but they’re mostly advertisements.”

Although this is a commonplace complaint, Liu said that his own reputation owes much to his willingness to state the obvious. His best known and widely acclaimed work, “People or Monsters?,” is the product of exactly that kind of attitude, he said.

Published in 1979, shortly after Liu was readmitted to the party and emerged from a 21-year period in labor camps and internal exile, “People or Monsters?” is an investigative report on corrupt party officials in northeastern China. Published in translation by Indiana University Press as the title piece of a collection of Liu’s writing, “People or Monsters” resembles tales of American political corruption. It is larded with examples of officials skimming money, stealing state property and intimidating opponents with threats.

Many of his fellow journalists hadn’t written similar stories because they “thought it was business as usual,” Liu said.

But with his fresh perspective, “I was just like somebody from another world, so my feelings were totally different,” he explained, adding that he could “look at the world and feel my feelings just like a peasant.”

‘Voice of the People’

By Liu’s account, his fame as a “voice of the people” was an unexpected byproduct of his journalism.

“When I saw something that ought to be exposed, I went ahead and did it without thinking of the consequences,” he said. “Some people said it was courageous, but it was really because I didn’t expect there would be so many people who would begin to oppose me and accuse me of slander. When I discovered that quite a few officials were opposing me, I felt that so many people were backing me up that I had to go forward. . . . Really, I am not so tough, especially when I was young. But life pushes me.”

In the same year that “People or Monsters” was published, Liu delivered a long speech to the Chinese Congress of Artists and Writers that was hailed as a brave statement that spoke for many colleagues who had dared not break silence.

“Literature is a mirror,” Liu said then. “When the mirror shows us things in life that are not very pretty, or that fall short of our ideals, it is wrong to blame the mirror. Instead we should root out and destroy those conditions that disappoint us. . . . Smashing a mirror is no way to make an ugly person beautiful, nor is it a way to make social problems evaporate.”

In the interview, Liu made it clear that his own private mirror did not reflect kindly on some Chinese leaders, particularly Mao Zedong, the legendary Communist chieftain who sought to make revolution a permanent state of affairs in China. On the couple of occasions that he met Mao, Liu said his impression was that the publicly venerated leader was, in fact, “too stern” and “cold and remote.”

Calm Man on the Outside

Outwardly, Liu is a calm man who speaks in quiet tones and chuckles or smiles frequently. But Perry Link, a specialist in modern Chinese literature at UCLA who has known Liu for several years, said that Liu is “very strong underneath and the relaxed attitude he displays is the result of weathering pretty strong storms in his life.” Link added: “He’s a battle ax. He’s dedicated to his principles, most of which are dedicated to telling the truth, the unvarnished truth about society.”

In China, Liu’s reputation as “a very stubborn gadfly vis-a-vis the party,” has grown in the last year, Link said. “He’s actually got more power since he was kicked out of the party than he did before.”

After his expulsion, Liu chose to remain silent rather than speak out against his enemies, Link said. “For a year, he said nothing. . . . He’s so revered in China that when he says nothing, people wonder why and they take it as dissatisfaction,” he continued.

Liu’s arrival here has created quite a stir in the local Chinese community, Link said, adding that Liu’s reputation among Chinese abroad is just as great as it is at home.

Liu himself implied that being an outcast is easier the second time around. Economic and political reforms in China in the last decade have made being expelled from the party less of a stigma than it used to be, he said. Furthermore, he spent most of last year meeting sympathizers and answering the letters that come pouring in. Some supporters even sent food, money or medicine, he added.

And later this year several collections of his work will be published in China, ending a ban on his writing, Liu said.

A Token Gesture

He had little difficulty in getting permission to leave China, Liu said, adding that the government probably is using him as a pawn in a public relations gambit. “My coming here is a token of the openness of the government,” he said.

Before he left Beijing about three weeks ago, Liu told The Times that some of his supporters, worried about his safety, had advised him to stay abroad. But Liu has vowed to return.

When he does go home, Liu said, he hopes to return to the grass-roots level that has been so productive for him in the past. Perhaps, he said, he will be able to “write something that is bigger than the things I have written. It would include all these important (recent) changes in Chinese life and society.”

But Liu remains a wary man. He does not expect to be readmitted to the Communist Party any time soon, if ever, he said. While non-party membership may be less of a handicap in China, Liu said it does wound him in one respect--travel to other communist countries. He doubts, for example, that he will ever again be invited to the Soviet Union, which he has visited several times, because of his expulsion from the Chinese party. So, he said, he will have to satisfy his curiosity about reforms now going on there from secondhand sources.

And fluctuations of policy and doctrine in China probably will always make his profession uncertain, he conceded.

“We don’t have a law for freedom of the press, so sometimes they give you more freedom, sometimes less,” he said.