China and the Lessons of Eastern Europe

Liu Binyan is China’s foremost journalist and one of its most prominent intellectuals. Purged from the Chinese Communist Party in the 1957 anti-rightist campaign, he was rehabilitated in 1979 and became the leading investigative reporter for the People’s Daily, writing numerous exposés of corrupt practices and abuses of power by party officials. Purged from the party again in 1987, he came to the United States the following year, where he has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, writer in residence at Trinity College in Connecticut, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Mr. Liu, whose publications in English include his autobiography A Higher Kind of Loyalty (1990) and China’s Crisis, China’s Hope (1990), is currently a visiting scholar at Princeton University. His article is based on a lecture he gave to the Evening Dialogue program at the Wilson Center on 16 January 1991.