His memoir, A Higher Kind of Loyalty, is an eloquent and powerful self-portrait offering searing accounts of corruption in the Communist Party. As a writer displaying courageous moral integrity and a charismatic personality, Liu was one of the revered figures in China.
Life under the Japanese occupation is passionately recorded, as are the tragic suffering of war, revolution, and staggering poverty that eventually led him to join the Communist Party in 1944.
In his book, readers get an insight on what it was like to work as a journalist in general and at the People's Daily in particular in post-1949 China, where censorship was tight, as well as life during the early days of the Communist rule. The memoir tells of his rapid rise to fame as a star reporter - until his involvement in the workers' strikes in Shanghai in 1957 which led him to write a personal letter of appeal on behalf of the workers to Chairman Mao Zedong, an action that resulted in him being labelled as an enemy of the Party. He was ostracised and denounced publicly for more than 20 years. For almost two decades, Liu lived the life of an internal exile, deep in rural China where he first encountered and learned how the vast majority of his people lived.
Even after his reinstatement, he had to walk the thin line in his comments and writings because of his ultra leftist label.
A Higher Kind of Loyalty offers readers an unforgettable portrait of old China - the lives of the workers and the peasants that he had interviewed by the thousands over the years - and the tragic stories of so many of China's bravest and most outspoken personalities who had been either denounced, killed or suffered discrimination during the Cultural Revolution.