--- description: The Exile and the Entrepreneur title: The Exile and the Entrepreneur image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [World](/section/world/) # The Exile and the Entrepreneur by [Hannah Beech](/author/hannah-beech/) Jun 7, 2004 4:00 AM CUT by [Hannah Beech](/author/hannah-beech/) Jun 7, 2004 4:00 AM CUT Just west of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a 31-year-old entrepreneur named Wang Lichao strides into a property-management office to pick up the keys to the headquarters of his new telecommunications company. After five years of building an interior design firm, he is shifting into one of the country’s hottest industries, serving as an ADSL subcontractor for China Network Communications. “There’s much more money in this business because it’s an emerging market,” says Wang Lichao, with the easy confidence of an M.B.A., even though he has never attended college. “Just look at the growth numbers in ADSL lines in Shanghai. Beijing is next and we want to cash in on the boom.” That night, Wang toasts his new business venture with a group of friends. But the person with whom he most wants to share his triumph no longer lives in Beijing, nor will he likely be back anytime soon. Wang Lichao picks up the phone and dials across the Pacific to talk to his cousin, the man he considers his best friend. After a few rings, an answering machine picks up. The soft, reedy voice once urged millions of mainland Chinese to press their government for democracy. Today, however, in stilted English, the voice tells the listener that Wang Dan is not at home. Wang Dan has not really been home for six years. The same day his cousin makes his next move in the Beijing business world, the 35-year-old exile shuffles into a lecture hall at Harvard University, where he has been studying since he was released from a Chinese prison in 1998\. Most of his days are spent cloistered in the library researching his thesis topic, a comparative study of politics in mainland China and Taiwan during the 1950s. This day, though, he emerges from the sequestered confines of academia to join several other student leaders from the Tiananmen era. Wang Dan is the most famous of them all. It was he who, as a 20-year-old student from Peking University, topped the list of most wanted “counterrevolutionaries” Beijing published after June 4, 1989\. Even now, as the Tiananmen veterans splinter into factions of recrimination and guilt, Wang Dan has maintained an integrity that perhaps no other top dissident enjoys. Many spent years in jail, as did Wang Dan (nearly a decade), but no one is more a symbol of the crushed democracy movement than this singularly uncrushed individual. Not, of course, that Wang Dan necessarily wants to be in this crowded classroom facing the same monotonous questions from students, journalists and sinophiles about what he did 15 years ago. Even the panel discussion with fellow dissidents is like a mild form of torture. “Every year we do the same speeches, and I know everything they are going to say, every joke,” he says. “Of course, they know what I’m going to say, too.” The melancholy of a life in exile may be all that awaits Wang Dan: the annual cycle of June 4 speeches, the energetic but mostly fruitless Internet campaigns, the applications to return home to China that are repeatedly denied. He has been forgotten in his homeland, just as the events themselves have been largely erased from the minds—and certainly the conversations—of average Chinese. Still, even though Beijing won’t admit that hundreds of people, possibly thousands, died in the 1989 crackdown, some of the students’ demands have been addressed. Increased official scrutiny of corruption, greater responsiveness to the needs of the people and, perhaps, even an unparalleled economic boom are all part of the June 4 legacy. But Wang Dan believes there is much more to be done and so he will persevere in what he sees as the greatest mission of all: bringing democracy to China. His latest petition drive condemns the sentencing of a fellow Tiananmen activist, Yang Jianli, to five years in jail, after Yang returned to China on a false passport. Not all of Wang Dan’s fellow exiles have remained so dedicated to—or obsessed with—their homeland. Some have reincarnated themselves as Internet entrepreneurs, stockbrokers, or in one case, as a chaplain for the U.S. military in Iraq. Several have been back to China to investigate potential business opportunities. Wang Dan has no quarrels with them for moving on from 1989, but he cannot. His work is what he considers his duty, his destiny. “I know the reason I am in America is because people died on June 4,” he says. “If I stop my activities, then I will be dishonoring their memory.” For that reason, he can never go home. Wang Dan can’t even get to Hong Kong, which this year again denied him a visa, explaining, he says, that “inviting him would hurt the long-term interests” of the territory. The tragedy for Wang Dan is that enduring exile has not nourished his movement back home; he is hardly a Nelson Mandela who inspired antiapartheid protests even while spending 27 years imprisoned on Robben Island. Instead, Wang Dan’s journey from Tiananmen Square to Harvard Square has brought an increasing irrelevancy, a feeling he articulates as “having to keep so much distance when I want to be so close.” In China, Wang Lichao is busy following not an American dream but today’s Chinese one: getting rich is now increasingly seen as a birthright for anyone young, urban and smart. But even as he moves comfortably into the mainland’s growing middle class, Wang Lichao is aware that there is something missing. It is not just the unfulfilled ideals of democracy and free speech for which his cousin fought and, in his quixotic way, is still fighting. Wang Lichao also misses the man himself. Tiananmen has torn their family apart. Most of Wang Dan’s other cousins want nothing to do with such a disreputable character. But Wang Lichao has remained fiercely loyal to his cousin. “Growing up, they were like two halves,” says Wang Dan’s mother, Wang Lingyun. “Wang Dan is a city boy who became famous and Wang Lichao is a country boy who no one knows. But they have a connection you rarely see even in brothers.” Now, each is like a shadow of the other: Wang Lichao stands for all that China has achieved, Wang Dan for all that remains to be done. Wang Dan was a skinny, bespectacled, city kid, but he returned to his mother’s native Shandong province every summer. Heze, the family’s ancestral town, lies in the breadbasket of China, lush with wheatfields and apple orchards. Even in the leanest years of the People’s Republic, people there had food. But they didn’t have much else. In the 1980s, Wang Lichao’s father eked out a living at an auto factory making shock absorbers. His salary was $3 a month. When Wang Dan came for the summer, though, he noticed little of the poverty, only a place of endless green where he could breathe freely. Together, the cousins climbed trees, herded the family’s one scrawny goat and threw stones at frogs. Sometimes, when they were resting on a bough of an old persimmon tree or wading through streams, Wang Dan would tell his cousin about life in Beijing: watching movies, drinking sodas, darting through bicycle traffic. In return, Wang Lichao, broader and more muscular than his cousin, would boast about his latest schoolyard fight. But Wang Dan didn’t approve of fisticuffs. “I got into scrapes nearly every week,” says Wang Lichao. “But Wang Dan would never hit anyone. He used words to fight instead.” In the spring of 1989, Wang Lichao learned just how potent those words could be. For years his cousin had written him once or twice a week, musing about everything from what Wang Lichao should study in college—history like him, of course—to why he was beginning to question the efficacy of Marxism. But in April 1989 the letters stopped arriving. Finally, Wang Lichao received a hastily scrawled note from his cousin, saying he should turn on the radio if he didn’t already know what was happening. That night, Wang Lichao listened to the news and heard how university students were streaming into Tiananmen Square, demanding radical reforms that included a path toward democracy. One of the leaders, Wang Lichao heard, was a 20-year-old Peking University history major called Wang Dan. As the protests in Beijing metastasized into a full-fledged movement, Wang Lichao, inspired by his cousin, scribbled a pro-democracy aphorism on his school blackboard. Those few words, however, were the extent of Wang Lichao’s activism, and he escaped with a mild rebuke from his teacher. Several days later he heard his cousin’s name again on the radio, this time branded as China’s Enemy No. 1. Many student leaders escaped after June 4, fleeing to the U.S. or Europe. Wang Dan was not among them. Arrested a month after the protests ended, he spent four years in jail, some of the time in solitary confinement in a cell less than 5 sq m. In 1993, just as Wang Lichao was graduating from high school and cramming for his college-entrance exams, Wang Dan was released from prison. Immediately, he returned to Heze and persuaded his cousin to come to Beijing to keep him company. A few weeks later, the 19-year-old visited the capital for the first time. College could wait, and indeed Wang Lichao never returned to school. The cousins lived together for two years. Wang Dan introduced him to his democracy-salon friends and gave him a pile of history and political-science books. Pretty soon, Wang Lichao was helping Wang Dan type up his essays on democracy to distribute to overseas publications. Wang Lichao’s most important role, however, was as an occasional body double and crack antipolice strategist. Late one night, five years after the massacre, the usual scrum of policemen were stationed in front of the Wangs’ apartment. Wang Dan sent his cousin down to check on the cops’ wakefulness. By 4 a.m., Wang Lichao reported that the plainclothes officers were asleep, so the pair sneaked out. After a two-day drinking binge with friends from Heze, the two headed north to the Yellow River Hotel, a remote inn nestled in the forested hills of Jinan province. By the time the Public Security Bureau caught up with them, nearly a week had passed. So angry were the cops that they shuttered the Yellow River Hotel for months for daring to allow a “black hand” like Wang Dan to check in. “It sounds funny, but those were some of our happiest times together,” says Wang Lichao. “We were both young and idealistic, and it felt like nothing could touch us even though terrible things had happened and were still happening all around us.” A year later, the happy interlude ended. Wang Dan was rearrested and eventually sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting “public opinion in plotting to subvert China’s people’s government and socialist system.” Without his cousin’s support, Wang Lichao was forced to return home to Heze. Once, he had been the smartest boy in his class. Now, he was back with no degree, no job, and rumors from the local Public Security Bureau that he was a _liumang_ (hooligan) whose trouble-making ways weren’t suited for a placid place like Heze. Wang Lichao taps his cell phone impatiently as his taxi sputters to a stop in the gridlock of Beijing’s Haidian district. The area he is passing through used to be a vegetable field when Wang Dan lived in the capital—back before he was released early from prison and exiled to the U.S. in 1998 as a goodwill gesture before a visit by the then U.S. President Bill Clinton. Today, the road that used to be cucumber-and-tomato farmland is lined with signposts to the Seine Villa residential complex and the Tiger Golf Club Pro Shop. More than almost any other district in Beijing, Haidian has been transformed from a sleepy collection of university campuses and low-slung concrete apartment blocks to a sprawl of high-rise residential towers and high-tech headquarters—the region is dubbed China’s Silicon Valley. “I think Wang Dan would be happy about China’s development,” Wang Lichao says, looking out of the taxi window at five lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Within sight are three Mercedes, two Lexuses, and a tricycle cart carrying a precarious load of mainland-made Konka televisions. Eleven years after the country boy skipped college to go to Beijing, he is proof of how welcoming China’s middle class can be. “When I came to Beijing, I was a blank piece of paper,” says Wang Lichao. “But once I started writing on that piece of paper, things started happening very quickly.” After his cousin was reimprisoned, Wang Lichao returned to Shandong and worked the only job he could find: selling shoes at a night market. He would buy footwear wholesale from a factory two kilometers away and mark them up by as much as 200%, depending on how gullible the buyer looked. Later, he peddled fax machines and parlayed those profits into a move back to the capital. There, he co-founded an interior design firm, before his recent move into telecom. Outside his office building in Haidian, a giant signboard for the CFA Testing Consultancy promises to coach wannabe business magnates, and techie types stride past carrying their notebook computers. “In China, if you work hard, you have opportunities,” says Wang Lichao. “When Wang Dan was a student, you had to depend on the state for a job, even if you were very talented. But now you can start your own business and look out for yourself.” Even though Wang Lichao, at 31, is four years younger than his cousin, he looks more comfortably ensconced. Prosperity has filled out his face; he wears a neatly pressed blue oxford shirt, khaki pants and sports a razor-straight hair part. In 2002 he bought a two-bedroom apartment in Haidian, in a fancy complex with statues of gladiators flanking the entrance. He lives there with his accountant wife and a black-and-white spotted rabbit. His wife knows of Wang Dan’s controversial activities, but unlike previous girlfriends, wasn’t scared off. “What Wang Dan did was a long time ago,” says Wang Lichao. “She knows that our life today isn’t connected with those events in the past.” Nevertheless, the pair have never told her parents about his connection to Wang Dan. Fifteen years is a long time, but maybe not long enough. After 40 minutes the taxi finally arrives at its destination, and Wang Lichao rides up a gleaming elevator to the brand-new apartment of his friend, Xu Zhonghua, a bookseller from Heze. Xu was a farmer until eight years ago, and when he was tilling his fields, he had only the vaguest understanding of the 1989 protests. Now, after reading much samizdat literature from Hong Kong and Taiwan, he’s articulately discussing politics with Wang Lichao. “They were fighting for all the same things we would like to fix in society today,” Xu says, as he digs into a six-course meal cooked by his wife. Wang Lichao nods, chases after a particularly slippery peanut, then continues his friend’s train of thought: “China has instituted economic reforms, and we have all profited from that. But before 1989 there was talk of political reform, and now it’s never mentioned. Wang Dan is so famous overseas, but here no one even knows who he is and what he stood for.” But Wang Lichao won’t be pushing publicly for freedom of speech and other pillars of democracy anytime soon. He may love Wang Dan and respect his ideals, but he has a business to run and a wife and a rabbit to feed. Life, he says, is happy—save for the fact that his best friend is nearly half a world away. Besides, the family needs him to take care of Wang Dan’s parents, because their son is in exile. Wang Lichao stops by about once a week to visit his uncle and aunt, who even 15 years after Tiananmen, are under surveillance by the police. “I worry about them and they worry about their son,” says Wang Lichao. “I tell them Wang Dan is happy in America, but I think I am happier than he is. How can he be happy when he is so far away from all his family?” The rusty 1971 Mercedes with a peeling American flag on the dashboard squeals down Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica, California. In the front seats are two of Tiananmen Square’s most famous dissidents: Wang Dan and Wang Chaohua (no relation to Wang Dan), an older student leader whose plea for moderation was drowned out by radicals and who is nowadays pursuing a Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature at UCLA. Wang Chaohua drives with the careless insouciance of a Beijing taxi driver, while Wang Dan looks decidedly nervous. “She’s a road warrior,” he says, trying out an English idiom. “I’m quite scared of her driving.” “You’re terrified of too many things,” Wang Chaohua retorts. “Stay cool.” Later, Wang Dan remarks more seriously: “It’s true, I am scared by many things. But one thing that doesn’t scare me is the Beijing \[central\] government.” The pair are heading to a lunch with several other Tiananmen activists, who gather yearly for commemorative events around June 4\. Despite their differing opinions on how to handle the aftermath of Tiananmen, the dissidents are cordial as they chow down at the Mandarin Shanghai Restaurant in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. None of the other Chinese patrons in the eatery recognize them, which one exile says is fine because sometimes Chinese Americans castigate them for ruining perfectly good business opportunities with talk of human rights. In Beijing, of course, the dissidents might go equally unrecognized, not just because of their widening paunches and graying hair but because most of the young generation there is ignorant of what happened 15 years ago. It is only when they head to a talk organized by a Hong Kong-based civic organization that things heat up. The 75-plus crowd is filled with groupies who treat the Tiananmen veterans like rock stars, and Chinese patriots who feel the 1989 crew was nothing more than a misguided group of idealists. Other critiques are more personal. In the Q.-and-A. session, a former Tiananmen activist screeches: “Why is it that Falun Gong gets so much attention and can hold big demonstrations in front of the Chinese embassy, while we do nothing? Are we all such cowards?” Wang Dan—who spends most of his free time writing petitions, testifying in front of Washington committees, and even organizing a lawsuit against Li Peng, a former Chinese government leader who helped order the crackdown against students—smiles politely and declines to answer the question. Later, he says with uncharacteristic vehemence: “Things like that make me want to disappear forever.” Apart from the flurry of activity around June 4, Wang Dan’s life is that of any doctorate student at Harvard. Before heading to the library, he takes a run beside the Charles River and wonders how his U.S. jogging fetish would be regarded in China. At mealtime, he slurps down noodles at a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square and estimates that he has personally contributed to the demise of a hundred fowl at a Peking-duck restaurant in Boston. “We exiles joke that the only part of us that has remained patriotic is our stomach,” he laughs. The rest of Wang certainly seems attached to America: he loves shopping (Armani Exchange is his favorite clothier) and he extols the virtues of Las Vegas. “It’s got fabulous hotels,” he says. “Just fabulous.” Wang Dan’s two-bedroom apartment is packed with 3,000 books, but he pines for the others he had to leave back home. Like his mother, who is also a historian, Wang Dan feels a need to intellectualize what he did, using books to explain the big important points. He can read books about the events of 1989, write historical theses, and act, all in all, like a true academic. Still, in front of Wang Dan’s bed hangs an oversize picture of that solitary man who stopped a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, before disappearing from the record books. The poster is a form of mental discipline. “I’m far away from China,” Wang Dan says, “but I look at the picture every day to remind myself why I am here and what still needs to be done.” For Wang Lichao, of course, Tiananmen Square is just a car ride away. Even though he wasn’t in Beijing during 1989, he has seen enough pictures of the bloodshed to want to stay away. But last month a friend from Heze came to visit, and Wang Lichao obligingly showed him the sights: the Forbidden City, Mao’s embalmed body and, finally, they walked the great expanse of Tiananmen Square together. Fifteen years after the People’s Liberation Army sent in tanks to crush the student democracy movement, everything has changed about Tiananmen—except the square itself. Today, the most visible features are the billboards for Jianlibao sports drink and KFC that ring the square, vying with Chairman Mao’s portrait for brand recognition. Old men with their rosy-cheeked grandchildren fly kites, while peasants from the countryside gawk at the vast space and at the miniskirted Beijing girls sashaying past. Just down Chang’an Boulevard, where soldiers had lobbed stun grenades into the crowds of fleeing students, a new glass-and-titanium National Theater designed by a Frenchman is taking form. A few blocks east, a soaring shopping mall boasts Nike, Max Mara and, of course, Starbucks—since caff mochas have supplanted tea as the hottest drink in town. Even the nearby Ministry of Public Security, whose members still harass relatives of the Tiananmen veterans, is being renovated, with a flock of cranes rising above the construction. Walking around Tiananmen, Wang’s friend was awed and humbled by the enormous square. Not once, though, did he ask about what happened 15 years ago, and Wang Lichao didn’t bring it up. The massacre is still taboo in mainland China. Even Wang Dan’s grandmother didn’t know about his exact role in the protests, and she died wondering why her favorite grandson never came to visit anymore. But Wang Lichao thinks about the events all the time. “I pass by all these places where so many students died,” he says, “and I wonder if I can find a bullet or some other evidence to prove it really did happen.” He hasn’t found anything, but Wang Dan’s mother lived with evidence for a decade. After 1989, Wang Lingyun worked as a historian on the fifth floor of the Revolutionary Museum near Tiananmen Square, and the sun streaming into her office always refracted into shattered rays because the window glass was cracked. Some time on the night of June 3-4, an errant bullet had made its way through the window and tore into the opposite wall. Even when she retired in 1999, the hole in the wall had still not been repaired. The hole in her family has not been mended, either. Wang Dan and Wang Lichao have come a long way since 1989, but they are now following roads that are taking them further and further apart. “They were so close as kids,” says Wang Lingyun. “Who would have known things would have turned out like this?” Indeed, when the city kid and his country cousin were lazing in that persimmon tree, they could scarcely have imagined that they would become the exile and the entrepreneur, twin legacies of an almost forgotten spring. 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