CHINA: A one-time communist party journalist, who became known in exile as the conscience of China, has died in the US aged 80.
Liu Binyan died in New Jersey after a long illness from cancer, Radio Free Asia reported.
He was visited on his death bed by family and some of the writers and intellectuals who joined him in exile after China's crackdown on anti-government demonstrations in 1989.
Liu joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1944 and worked as a reporter for the China Youth Daily and the People's Daily.
He was first purged in the 1950s for semifictional accounts of abuses of power. After his political rehabilitation in 1979, his increasingly bold calls for free speech and combative exposés of official corruption put him at odds with China's leadership.
Liu was expelled from the party in 1987 and arrived in the US the following year. He was a passionate supporter of China's pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989.
He was a visiting scholar at Harvard and then Princeton and participated in many campaigns for human rights in China.
"Liu Binyan was a leader of China's intellectual liberation movement in the 1980s," said Liu Xiaobo, a Beijing-based dissident. "Thanks to his courage, justice and defence of the people, he was honoured as the conscience of China."
A spokesman for China's foreign ministry said: "We have already reached our conclusions about him."