BY ALEX HO

In print | Published April 3, 2008

80-year-old Liu Binyan lounges about in his nondescript house in bland East Windsor, New Jersey. He picks up the New York Times, takes out scissors and begins cutting, explaining that making newspaper clippings is the first task of his morning routine. He’s been diagnosed with colon cancer and explains that he is doing less work and seeing fewer friends because of his health. He shows us his study, covered from ceiling to floor in books — Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” Marx and Engels’ writings. Liu talks about his love of reading and how so many great books so quickly are forgotten and disappear.

The same can be said about mainland China’s modern history and Liu’s own monumental role in it. One might hardly suspect, in such a demure setting, that Liu Binyan was once the most prominent Chinese journalist, no small feat in a country that has no rivals when it comes to media censorship. Alumna Meggie Miao ‘03 came to Swarthmore this past Monday to show her documentary “To Tell the Truth” about the incredible life of Liu Binyan. Among the amazing facts of Liu’s life provided by the film, Liu was kicked out of the Communist Party twice and finally exiled from China in 1989 during the crackdown on the Democracy Movement. He was only active as a journalist for nine years of his life, having spent most of his formidable years doing hard labor in reeducation camps. And yet in those nine years, he managed to publish articles in prominent publications, voicing the injustices that could not be voiced in such a repressive society, and leading many to call him “the conscience of China.”

Liu’s life reads like a textbook on China’s last half century with every sweeping nationalist movement usually resulting in Liu’s falling out with the Communist Party, incarceration in labor camps, and eventual reacceptance into the Party. Liu was among the victims of the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956, where Mao Zedong encouraged intellectuals to voice their grievances, only to turn these against them in a witch-hunt. Having written about corruption, Liu was personally criticized by Mao, banned from the Party, labeled as a “rightist” and sent to a labor camp. He was eventually freed, only to be reeducated again in 1969 during the mad social experiment of the Cultural Revolution.

Finally, after Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping’s reform policy, Liu immediately resumed work as a journalist. In 1979, Liu wrote the widely read “People or Monsters,” which said, “The Communist Party regulates everything, but does not regulate the Communist Party.” This and 1985’s “A Second Kind of Loyalty” placed Liu in a prominent spotlight in the democracy movement, causing Liu to once again be expelled from the Communist Party. In 1988, Liu was invited to the United States to speak at various universities, and during his stay, the Tiananmen Massacre broke out. Miao shows footage of Liu on ABC’s Nightline, stating “If [Deng Xiaoping and the Communist Party] have lost their senses the first time, now they have completely lost their humanity.” Afterwards, Liu was barred from returning to China.

Miao deftly portrays the events of Liu’s life through a combination of archival footage and interviews from various American sinologists and fellow dissident writers. But Miao also provides a personal angle to Liu’s story, interviewing his wife, who accompanied him to the U.S., and his son and daughter, who remain in China. Miao’s interviews with Liu’s family members impress how much was tragically lost at the expense of Liu’s journalistic courage. Liu did not see his wife or children through long portions of their lives, during which time the family lived only off of Liu’s wife’s income. Though many dissidents were abandoned by their families for the sake of their families’ survivals, Liu’s wife and children steadfastly remained with Liu.

Adding to the resonance of Miao’s documentary is her own personal connection to Liu as explained in her first-person voice-over narrative. As the daughter of a dissident writer, Miao left China for the U.S. in 1994 and soon after met Liu Binyan through her mother. Miao recounts, “I didn’t understand the unreserved reverence all the adults had for him. I wondered, who was he?” Eleven years later, Miao was invited to Liu’s 80th birthday celebration and learned more about his incredible background. Having just entered graduate studies in photography and video, Miao began to piece together a documentary about Liu.

Contrary to the Party’s view of Liu, Miao’s documentary shows how much Liu’s critical writing was a product of his love for the Chinese people and his idealism for social welfare that is essentially rooted in Marxism. Even exiled in the U.S., Liu worked tirelessly to cover Chinese news — continuing to publish books, publishing a journal in Hong Kong with his wife and providing commentary on Radio Free Asia. Still, Miao, observing Liu in a Plainsboro library maneuvering through a crowd of Americans, who have no idea whom he is, asserts in her narration that he “should be back in China where he belongs.”

Unfortunately, Liu was never able to return to his homeland, having died on December 5, 2005, an event that is depicted in the documentary with Liu’s wife’s matter-of-fact message on Miao’s answering machine played to a shot of snow-covered Jersey through a car.

Miao’s documentary ends with a depressing epilogue, wondering whether or not any of China’s new generation even knows who Liu Binyan is. Some students at the screening wished that the film had looked at progress in China today, rather than dwelling on China’s past unresolved tragedies, a sentiment that Miao responded to by discussing her next potential project, which will look at adolescent sexuality in today’s China.

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