A FORMER Communist Party stalwart who became known as the conscience of China for his exposés of the darker practices of the system has died in exile in the United States of cancer, aged 80.

Although Liu Binyan was fêted among dissidents and many of China’s intellectuals as a liberal hero, the story behind his banishment for the last 17 years of his life was complicated.

Like many dissidents, he lived abroad partly by force and partly by choice. He was a committed Marxist who wanted to play a role in China’s Communist revolution, while fulfilling his responsibilities as a journalist. Throughout a career in which he fell foul of party leaders at least three times, Mr Liu made it his vocation to expose corruption and the abuse of power. What set him apart was that he chose to confront the system from within, valuing his position as a party member and writer for official publications while lifting the curtain on the darker side of the party. “He was a very reluctant dissident,” Geremie Barme, Professor of Chinese History at the Australian National University in Canberra, said. Mr Liu lost his party membership in 1987, criticised by Deng Xiaoping for stirring student unrest.

His fall followed the dismissal at the start of that year of his protector, the reform-minded party leader Hu Yaobang, whose death in 1989 sparked the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. By then Mr Liu was already at Harvard. He never returned home. Negotiations on his homecoming did not materialise, partly because of his conditions for returning, sources told The Times.

He first gained fame for his accounts of the new China of Mao Zedong, but he was purged in the 1950s. He later spent eight years in a labour camp. He was rehabilitated in 1979 but purged again in 1987.

He spent his life in exile as a visiting scholar at Harvard and then Princeton and took part in many campaigns, calling for improved human rights in China.

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