[PEN-L:7752] Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Mao

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tiananmen is extremely complex.  The fact that Premier Zhao was in North Korea
during the early days of the student protests has a most unfortunate impact.
The early students protests were in fact left refomist in thrust.  But after
the arrival of the Western, mostly American press with live TV coverage, let in
to cover the Gorbachev visit, the student movement turned reactionary and
counter-revolutionary, with American cash inducement and TV celebrity
temptations.  The major networks paid for interviews, coached the interview
subjects and spinned the stories daily toward anti-government and anti-Party
directions.  The Gettsburg address was recited on CNN by a young student who
obvious had no idea what he was reading.  Desspite government concessions, the
students leaders kept escalating.  See the film by Hinton (daughter) in which
segments showed power grapping and maneuvering by the emerging leaders.
Yes, the Internationale was sung, but where did all the students leader go
after they left China? To US campuses.  They have since stopped singing the
Internationale.

The following is a report on what sond they are sinnging now:
(Most of them are making out better than DeLong.  No wonder DeLong is trying so
hard.)


                                                   March 27 - April 3, 1
September - 9 7

Cashing in on Tiananmen

After the bloody crackdown in China, a few brave student leaders escaped to
carry on the fight from American shores. At least that was the story.
Here's what really happened.

by Yvonne Abraham

In the spring of 1989, Li Lu was hunger-strike thin, long-haired,
fervent, and only 23 years old. A student leader in the Tiananmen Square
demonstrations, he urged his fellow dissidents to stand firm against the
Chinese government, even after it looked as though Deng Xiaoping had run out of
patience. After Deng ordered the June 4 crackdown that killed at least 300
people, Li, with no possessions and little English, fled to America.

Here, Li learned just how much the West could offer. In the Tiananmen protest,
he had been one of thousands of students; in America, he fast became one of the
stars of 1989. Sure, he wore castoff clothing at first, but they were Sting's
castoffs. Within a few years, he had collected scholarships to Columbia
(business and law), a ghostwritten autobiography (Moving the Mountain), a film
based on the book (Madonna attended the premiere), and a circle of influential
friends.
When Li graduated from Columbia with degrees in business and law, and
billionaire John Kluge threw him a party, the New Yorker was there to write
about it.

Now the former student radical is an investment banker at a large firm in Los
Angeles, a world away from his days on the square. He pops up on television
quite often, a stocky, bespectacled, clean-cut man in his early 30s, to talk to
Charlie Rose or CNN about the events of 1989, or to offer his opinion on
US-China trade relations.  Li Lu has made it.

                                                      Star power

But talk to members of Boston's sizable Chinese dissident community, and Li's
story is recounted not with pride but disdain. Li is one of a handful of
Chinese students who have traded on Tiananmen to make themselves darlings of
the Western media, which has brought them book contracts, hefty speaking fees,
celebrity friends, political access, Nobel Prize nominations, and roles as
China pundits. But, say their many critics, these stars, these public faces of
the near-revolution of 1989,
have parlayed what were sometimes only small roles in China -- and, in some
cases, only a few weeks in Tiananmen Square -- into fame and fortune in the
West. They marvel at the American public's naivete in declaring these people
world leaders. And accuse the star dissidents of hurting the cause they claim
to represent.

With the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown approaching, the heroes of 1989
will be celebrated anew. Deng's death, Hong Kong's imminent reversion to
Chinese rule, and the latest White House soft-money scandal will keep China in
the papers and on television for months to come. And the telegenic, media-savvy
few will turn up on our TV screens claiming to represent the many whose lives
did not meet with such tremendous success. Many dissidents both here and in
China look at these anointed heroes and see not success but failure -- but
that's hardly relevant, since their criticism is rarely heard in the West.

In part, this is a familiar story of human weakness in the face of
extraordinary opportunity and dizzying temptation. A few kids took the
extravagant rewards and blandishments the West offered them and ran, some
farther than others.

But more than that, this is the story of America's need to anoint
heroes. And if those heroes are just like us, all the better. We watched the
events of 1989 unfold live in our own homes. At times, the demonstrations in
Tiananmen Square seemed targeted specifically for our consumption: students
emblazoned banners and T-shirts with slogans in English to attract the cameras;
when a 10-meter high Goddess of Democracy was brought into the square, it bore
an uncanny resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. As we watched Tiananmen, we
watched ourselves.

There is no denying that Li was brave in 1989. Or that his fellow
students Wu'er Kaixi, Chai Ling, and Shen Tong, each of whom found their way to
Boston after June 4, displayed enormous courage and a deep commitment to their
cause, even against a despotic regime capable of enormous cruelty.

But there is also no denying that, once they'd left China, these heroes
were fashioned for Western consumption, just like those English signs in
Tiananmen Square. They were flacked and handled and tailored for a public just
itching to bestow accolades on somebody. What they actually did in the square
was less important than how well they presented themselves.

"I am much disappointed in the students," says dissident journalist Liu Binyan,
editor of China Focus, a New Jersey-based periodical. "They are not what they
say they are."

Part 2 - Almost a revolution

For six weeks during the spring of 1989, it looked as though the
revolution would indeed be televised. The Tiananmen Square
demonstrations -- thousands of students rising up against Deng Xiaoping and the
tyranny of the Communist Party -- transfixed the world.
Reporters had gone to Beijing to cover Gorbachev's visit; instead, they found
the makings of a revolution. Cameras provided live,
minute-by-minute coverage. The whole world was watching when 100,000 students
gathered in the square on April 22, and when students from more than 40
universities marched on Tiananmen five days later. Cameras captured the drama
of May 13, when several hundred of the students began a hunger strike, and of
the next week, as more and more of them became ill and were carted off to the
hospital, ambulance sirens bleating.

The whole world watched Wu'er Kaixi -- the bold, good-looking young education
student, weakened by his hunger strike, still wearing his hospital pajamas --
aggressively lecture hardline premier Li Peng
between drags of oxygen, and then finally faint from the strain. It
watched as the diminutive, frail-looking Chai Ling shouted her
baby-voice rallying cries into a megaphone over and over, exhorting her fellow
students to maintain their resolve. And it watched when the tanks pushed toward
Beijing, only to be stopped outside the city by the masses. And on May 30, when
the luminous Goddess of Democracy was installed on the square.

>From the world's living rooms, it looked like freedom and democracy were about
to come to China. The students were unstoppable. It was a struggle to which any
American with a basic understanding of what makes this country great could
relate: as portrayed by the media, the students wanted a free press, the right
to assembly, and an accountable government. Suddenly, the Chinese, hitherto
inhabitants of an inscrutable and sometimes threatening nation, were completely

fathomable. In the student movement, American TV audiences saw a
reflection of their nation's own glorious past, the birth of democracy
caught in a freeze-frame.
But Tiananmen was never quite what it appeared to be.

Sure, reporters found students who could quote a line or two from the
Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address, but the movement was
never a push for American-style democracy, despite students' use of the word.
Their aims, insofar as they even articulated them, amounted more to a reform of
Communist rule than to a push for constitutional democracy. At the height of
the protests, it seemed that all of China was marching arm-in-arm toward
democracy. But fully three-quarters of the nation's 1.2 billion people live off
the land; they were not about to rise up and charge to polling booths. And the
students weren't pushing for universal suffrage anyway.

Nor, indeed, did the demonstrators speak with one voice. There were
bitter arguments between student groups on the square over tactics. And there
were nasty fights over finances: Chai Ling was kidnapped and briefly held by
members of a rival student faction over alleged
financial improprieties. An AP reporter took Wu'er Kaixi to dinner at
the height of the hunger strike and failed -- as did many others -- to
report that for some students, the term "hunger strike" was applied
rather loosely. Reporters had apparently decided that to portray the
students as less than perfect would diminish the worthiness of their
struggle, and would give Deng ammunition to use against them in a
propaganda war.

There was also an ahistorical bent to the coverage of 1989, as if this
were the first mass movement for political reform in China's history. It was
not. In April 1976, for example, thousands of people gathered in Tiananmen
Square to mourn dead premier Zhou Enlai, and to criticize officials close to
Mao -- until police drove them out. In 1978, the Democracy Wall movement began,
in which people put up hundreds of posters criticizing the political system. In
1979, the movement was crushed, and Deng had several activists arrested,
including the most famous, Wei Jingsheng. Wei, who has been imprisoned for all
but six months of the 18 years since then, remains China's most celebrated
political prisoner.

But as long as TV audiences were unaware of the fate of those previous reform
attempts, it was easier to believe that the students would prevail.

On the night of June 3, 1989, the tanks rolled into Beijing again, and
this time the people could not keep them back. Soldiers killed hundreds of
people in the streets, forced the students out of the square, and destroyed the
Goddess of Democracy.
The ultimate symbol of those six weeks came at their very end: on one of the
streets leading to the square, a lone worker, a white-shirted
nobody, stood motionless before a column of tanks, bringing them to a
standstill -- the dauntless individual against the tyranny of the state.
This image became the most enduring of the Beijing Spring, and one of the most
memorable of the late 20th century.

Part 3 - Coming to America

The TV cameras had protected the students for a long time: Deng would hardly
have put up with such a flagrant challenge to his authority for six whole weeks
had the world's media not been in China to cover Gorbachev. Nor, for that
matter, would the students have been so bold.
The protests were a testament to the power of the Western press.

That power wasn't lost on Chinese students in America. During the spring of
1989, hundreds of Boston's Chinese students and expatriates converged on a
three-story house in Newton, part of the Walker Center for Ecumenical Exchange.

The Walker Center had long been a haven for political exiles from all
over the globe, including China. In 1989, the center provided phones and a fax
machine so that Chinese expatriates living in Boston could keep in touch with
friends and relatives, sending them Western newspaper reports on the protests,
and, later, updates on the crackdown. It was one of the few ways those in China
received news of the student dissidents' fates, which Deng's government was
unwilling to make public. It became a kind of command central, a remote outpost
of the movement, itself the subject of several national news reports.

It was here, at the Walker Center, that Tiananmen Square protester and former
Beijing University biology student Shen Tong first arrived on June 11, 1989.
The first of the students to come to America (others had fled first to Hong
Kong or Paris), he emerged publicly on June 30, at his own press conference.
The place was jammed.

At that first press conference, Shen was a shy youth who spoke halting
English.  Now he is a supremely confident, articulate, and, above all,
media-savvy man of 28. He has exchanged biology for a PhD in political science
at Boston University. He also heads the Democracy for China Fund (DCF), which
he says is a full-time job, too.

So, he says, he sleeps little. "I follow the words of Napoleon," says
Shen. "Anyone who sleeps more than four hours a night is a fool."

Sitting in Harvard's noisy Greenhouse Coffee Shop, remembering that press
conference, Shen is struck most by the efficiency of the media machine. "There
was a huge turnout," he says. "Reporters were flying to Newton from all over
the country. The impact of that -- of how established the media response was --
was very important for me."

Indeed, Shen's first public appearance demonstrated that even the
students in the square, with their banners in English and their
"of-the-people-by-the-people-for-the-people" soundbites, had
underestimated the power of the media. Shen's future would be
transformed by that power.

But at his first press conference, it was busy transforming his past.
"We are taking great precautions about everything because he's very high on the
most-wanted list," Gordon Shultz, executive director of the Walker Center, told
the Globe, which described Shen as "one of the three major student leaders" of
the movement. In fact, as Shen says today, "I was a small potato." Nor was he
on the Chinese government's most-wanted list; he had come to America on a
student visa. Already, the spin had begun.

"Today I am in mourning for all the Chinese people," Shen said, reading from a
statement in English. He told the enormous press corps that he had been on
Changan Avenue, where the worst violence took place, in the early hours of June
4, and that he had seen the soldiers killing people all around him. He wiped
tears from his eyes. The Globe reported that he "projected charisma."

At one point, Shen turned his back to the television cameras to show off his
T-shirt. "This is the Statue of Liberty," he said. "And this says
`Democracy,' and this says `Freedom.' " He had crossed from closed
society to media circus, and he was learning fast.

A month after Shen Tong's press conference, Wu'er Kaixi arrived at the Walker
Center. Charismatic, telegenic, and number two on China's most-wanted list,
Wu'er was one of the most famous people on earth. He had escaped first to Hong
Kong, then spent several weeks in Paris, and had finally come to Boston. Wu'er
was a star of the movement even before he left China. Once here, he was in
constant demand. Rival Chinese student groups in Chicago fought over who would
have him appear at their meetings. And then there were the social engagements:
he spent one of his first weekends in Massachusetts on the Kennedy compound in
Hyannis.
He was so busy that first week that he stood up Mayor Raymond Flynn for
breakfast.

Meanwhile, Li Lu (who was traveling on business and did not return calls by
deadline) had fled the country and wound up in Manhattan. Chai Ling (who
declined to be interviewed for this article) settled temporarily in Paris
before coming to America in the spring of 1990.

In China, each of these students was one among many. In America, they were
suddenly thrust, not just into an alien culture, but way up into its highest
reaches. They'd gone from hunger strikes to banquets in their honor, most of
them in the space of six months.

The most famous students were presented with a bewildering array of
options, besieged with requests to appear on television, to speak at
political rallies, to have their lives made into books and movies. They
were also offered places at American universities -- Chai at Princeton,
Li at Columbia, Wu'er at Harvard, and Shen at Brandeis. They were called on to
brief Congress on the situation in China, and to make speeches at colleges and
churches. They joined the speaking circuit, where they garnered thousands of
dollars in fees to tell the American public about China, and the movement, and
what it was like to be heroes.

Part 4 - Dissident PR

No one knows exactly what became of the lone white-shirted worker. He stood his
ground for several minutes; then other demonstrators pulled him back off the
road. He disappeared into the crowd, his brief, glorious career as embodiment
of democratic ideals over -- at least in China.

But in the West, his image became a star. The man in front of the tanks became
the Man in Front of the Tanks, and he had a hectic schedule of public
appearances: he popped up in a Benetton advertisement, a Wim Wenders movie, a
Neil Young song, and speeches by George Bush. Everyone wanted to be associated
with this star of 1989, who, despite the Western media's strenuous efforts to
find him, remained hidden.

Americans were not about to let the student dissidents get away so
easily. Just as the Man in Front of the Tanks was ripe for appropriation by all
kinds of people, so too were the dissidents. They were much in demand -- not
just by print media and TV, but also by individuals hoping some of their cachet
would rub off on them.

Enter the patrons, who, from a certain angle, looked suspiciously like
that most American of paraprofessionals: the handler. The most
successful dissidents formed friendships with Americans who -- depending on
whom you talk to -- either guided them through the circus or helped them polish
their public images to best advantage.

"The dissidents were being offered everything that our wide-open,
celebrity-driven society can cook up," says Marshall Strauss, a former DC
fundraiser and lobbyist who was one of those Americans. "They were coming out
of a closed, authoritarian society, and didn't know what they were
experiencing. They developed relationships with patrons who'd offer them more
and more concrete advice.  And if you observed it from the outside, these
people were handling them."

Chai Ling turned to David Phillips, of the Congressional Human Rights
Foundation, in Washington, who helped her sort through the avalanche of media
inquiries and career opportunities in the beginning. Li Lu, who had all of New
York to himself, dissident-wise, had many Americans smoothing his transition.
Mary Daly, a New York human-rights activist and public-relations specialist,
gave him a home for a while, helped him to deal with the press, and raised
money from her friends for his first semester at Columbia (scholarships took
care of the rest). And he became good friends with Trudie Styler, Sting's wife
-- hence the castoffs.
Back then, Li didn't even know who Sting was.

Styler took up Li's cause with a fervor, buying the rights to Moving the
Mountain, which she and Michael Apted made into an ornate, gauzy,
reenactment-glutted documentary. When the New Yorker wrote about his graduation
party, it referred to the former student as "a Nelson Mandela figure" for
China. Of all the dissidents, Li had risen the highest.

For the first few months in America, Shen Tong and Wu'er Kaixi were a team, and
to guide them at first, they had Marshall Strauss. "I
developed a relationship with several Chinese," Strauss recalls. "The
closest was with Shen Tong, but I also was friendly with Kaixi and
others. I was as close as any American, but I didn't have a lock on
them."

Strauss says patrons were sometimes possessive about their charges:
"Everyone wanted to get to them," and, he adds, to keep others from
getting to them -- to "have a lock on them." If the media wanted to
speak to Shen Tong, they went to Strauss first. (He is still kicking
himself for telling Charlie Rose that Shen was too busy for an
appearance, suggesting Li Lu instead. "I thought it was just a local TV talk
show," he says.)

During those first few months, Wu'er and Shen made a dizzying number of public
appearances and speeches at pro-democracy rallies across the country. Their
renown soon reached ludicrous proportions. Less than three months after tanks
had rolled into Beijing, the two youths found themselves in a flashy house in
the Hollywood hills negotiating a deal with studio executives for a film based
on their lives. In October of 1989, rounding out their rise from Beijing to big
bucks, they held court at the William Morris agency's New York offices as nine
publishers vied for the rights to their joint memoirs.

"It was this incredible stage play," recalls Strauss, "the excitement of
these famous Tiananmen leaders holding court, and every 45 minutes
another editor comes in!"

Houghton Mifflin won, with a $100,000 advance for Almost a Revolution.

But it was all too much for Wu'er. He had emerged from Tiananmen as the biggest
star, but handled the hype machine badly, and, by the end of 1989, his
celebrity began to exact a price. Chinese-language newspapers worldwide ran
stories about his grand lifestyle: he had expensive taste in suits; he was
petulant and arrogant in public, refusing to speak at one Harvard function
because the audience had been "disrespectful."
Being the star speaker at so many events had gone to his head.

Having reaped the benefits of media adulation, Wu'er did not quite grasp the
importance -- and the perishability -- of good press. Wu'er admits that he was
also completely out of control at the time. "I don't think anyone could really
refuse that temptation," he says. "I was lost."

Part 5 - Money by the envelopes

In the end, the lobsters did Wu'er in.

For these few dissidents, the fame that brought access and celebrity
friends and public appearances also, of course, brought money. The more
celebrated the dissidents got, the more money they collected -- speaking fees
that could run to four or five thousand dollars, film-option money,
book-advance money, and, most important, envelope money. At rallies and
gatherings, affluent Chinese expatriates handed the dissidents envelopes full
of cash -- red envelopes intended as gifts for their personal use, and others
to support their continued work for reforms in China.

Giving money was a way of being associated with what was, in the first few
years, a glamorous cause: donors could feel like they were
participating in the great revolution, affording them access to -- and
an association with -- the stars who were in such high demand. It was
also a way for expatriate Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong businesspeople to
express their anger at the crackdown, and at Deng's regime in general.

In China, the dissidents had been struggling students in a just-improving
economy, kids who got caught up in events that suddenly got much bigger than
many of them had expected. In the first few years after Tiananmen Square,
millions of dollars passed through their hands.
Many of the dissidents were still in their early 20s, and they were
running the equivalent of small corporations. Within months of the
Beijing Spring, by virtue of their accidental fame, they were now both
the embodiments of Western-style democratic ideals and the custodians of
hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were, of course, hardly qualified for
either role.

The lobster dinner that Wu'er Kaixi bought for 10 of his dissident
friends was not cheap. He admits that it cost all of $2000, but says he
bought the meal with money from a red envelope. That fact was lost on the
reporters who wrote of his decadent life in Chinese-language
newspapers from America to mainland China.
The GDP per capita in China is $2660, and here was one of the Tiananmen leaders
spending almost that on a single dinner for his friends -- while his comrades
were languishing in Chinese prisons and camps, and most of the country was
still impoverished, despite Deng's economic reforms.
This was one story from the West that the Communist Party happily passed on to
the Chinese people. See? the argument went. This is who your so-called leaders
really are. Now do you think they were right?

"I could have deposited the money and nobody would know," counters Wu'er.
Instead, he shared it. But the damage was done. It was the kind of thing that
eventually drove Wu'er out of the spotlight and away from the frenzy
surrounding him.

It was also the kind of thing that helped diminish enthusiasm for the
dissidents' cause, making donors reluctant to keep handing over
envelopes. Most of the money donated to dissidents was meant for
foundations they headed -- the Federation for a Democratic China (FDC), a
Paris-based organization of which Wu'er was vice-president; Chai's China
Dialogue Foundation; or Shen's Democracy for China Fund.

For the most part, those foundations, set up to continue to fight for
reform in China, had little to show for the millions of dollars they
received during the flurry of outrage in the years immediately after the
crackdown. "The first dissidents did  a terrible job [with] money in 1989 and
1990," says Marshall Strauss. "They received millions of
dollars, and they pissed it away. They didn't know what to do
with it all, and they wouldn't listen to advice, so the people who were
giving the money became profoundly disenchanted." It was impossible to keep
tabs on how the money was spent. Somehow, it just disappeared, and the
foundations had nothing to show for it all.

The money paid for air travel and expensive conferences, and, in the
case of the FDC, supported a disastrous scheme for a pirate radio
station that was to broadcast to China from a boat in international
waters off Taiwan. (After putting the FDC into the red, the project
tanked when Taiwan would not cooperate.)
Much of the money purportedly went to clandestine activities in China, which
were impossible to monitor.

Eventually, the flow of money to dissidents slowed to a trickle. The
envelopes stopped coming in, and the fight for political reforms in
China acquired a fiduciary-credibility problem.

The FDC has now withered, and Chai's China Dialogue Foundation is
difficult to locate: there is no record of it in central listings of
nonprofits and foundations, even though on a recent Charlie Rose
appearance Chai was identified as its president. Both Chai and Li tend to fly
solo these days, anyway. Their critics say they have little real contact with
the cause, except to speak about it to Americans.
But the Democracy for China Fund -- which helps fund underground
dissident activity in China -- lives, says Shen. By Shen's account, the
DCF, with an annual budget of about a third of a million dollars, is
still standing because Shen, under Marshall Strauss's tutelage, courted
the support of American partners -- human-rights, civil-rights, and
neoconservative groups -- so that he would be less reliant on funding from
Chinese donors. He also learned the basics of Western business practice --
proposals, annual reports, grant applications, and all the rest -- so that
Americans would be willing to deal with him.

He offered to teach other dissidents to build alliances with Americans,
and to do business the way Strauss had taught him. Shen tried to tell
them he could be "a bridge between the island -- the exile movement -- and
Western society." But then, says Shen, with the kind of bravado that marked
Wu'er's earlier days, "The island disappeared and the bridge became the
island." In other words, these days, Shen Tong is the exile movement.

Part 6 - Almost a revolutionary

Which is quite a claim for someone who started out -- like most other
dissidents -- in Wu'er Kaixi's shadow after Tiananmen. Privately, most of the
people interviewed for this story suggest that Shen Tong has constructed a
career out of a not-very-prominent role in the events of 1989. In the gossipy
world of the expatriate dissident community, Shen's ghostwritten autobiography,
Almost a Revolution, is disparagingly referred to as Almost a Revolutionary.

After Wu'er Kaixi crashed and burned within months of his stardom, Shen Tong
rose like a phoenix from his friend's ashes. Indeed, Shen Tong's career in the
first few years following 1989 represents the Dissident, Inc., phenomenon in
its purest form.

Late in 1989, Orville Schell, China authority and dean of UC Berkeley's
journalism school, in a Rolling Stone article about Shen and Wu'er, had picked
Shen as the dissident most likely to succeed. He had a good head on his
shoulders and a strong commitment to the cause.

Of course, Schell failed to disclose that at the time he was one of
Shen's closest advisers, making sure the young dissident kept a good
head on his shoulders and a strong commitment to the cause. The
prophesies of the celebrity machine were nothing if not self-fulfilling.
Furthermore, Schell's wife, Liu Baifang, helped broker the film deal
Schell describes in his Rolling Stone article. In December, Newsweek
(again partly at Schell's suggestion) named Shen one of the men of the year.

In 1992, with interest in the movement -- and Shen's popularity --
waning, Shen and Strauss decided the student should make a trip back to China.
The operation was conceived from the start as a media event. It was also a
study in the manufacture of celebrity. Shen planned the trip to link up with
dissidents who had been forced underground by Deng's crackdown in 1989. "Going
back, we might have sparked something that's already there," says Shen. "But
history doesn't always respond to this spark."

He and Strauss had planned the trip down to the last detail, apparently
assuming Shen would be arrested. Shen spent three months in China, meeting with
dissidents, all along being trailed by a French/German documentary team, and
part of the way by ABC's cameras. Strauss had several people in Washington and
in the media on stand-by. In the weeks before the trip, Shen filmed a
public-service announcement, or PSA, in which he said, "My friends died for the
right to vote. I'm going to go back to China for the right to vote. Please
vote."

"We knew it would be an effective PSA anyway," says Strauss, "but it would be
an extraordinary PSA if he was arrested. I wanted to bring home to Americans
who this kid was who was going back to China." After five weeks, the inevitable
happened: just after Shen had called a press conference announcing he'd be
opening a DCF office in Beijing, he was taken from his mother's home and
detained in a Beijing guest house.

All of the machinery Strauss and Shen had so meticulously put in place swung
into action. Within a couple of hours of Shen's arrest, the story was
everywhere. Strauss had already written an op-ed on Shen's behalf, which was
published in the New York Times the very next day. He also slapped a postscript
onto the PSA to say Shen had in fact been arrested, and sent out 200 copies.
"The impact of Shen Tong's arrest was far greater because that PSA existed,"
says Strauss. "It was done, I proudly say, as well as any Washington operation
would have done to get the story out."

Even after he was detained, Shen's high profile made him immune to real danger.

But his trip was not without casualties. Ten of the dissidents Shen had met
with were arrested, their hitherto hidden work in China exposed.
Shen was allowed to leave the country seven weeks later. Those arrested for
meeting with him were all released, he says, eventually. But not immediately.
Shen had taken the media circus back to China, and -- like the cameras on
Tiananmen Square -- it was no match for the power of the party.

Most of the people interviewed for this story criticized Shen for his
China trip, characterizing it as naive and irresponsible. Ask Harvard
China specialist Merle Goldman, usually mild and positive about the
dissident community, whether there is an underground movement in China these
days, and she says, "There was the beginning of one -- before Shen Tong went
there."

Shen is aware of the controversy, but says those arrested knew what they were
getting into. Besides, he says, "That trip really gave a pump, an injection to
the cause. There was more media attention on the movement in general as a
result of the '92 return."

There was also a great deal more media attention on him. "On my return, my
profile was raised very much," he says. "But it was not something I enjoyed
from a personal point of view or a professional point of view."
Still, his enhanced reputation made it easier to raise money for his
foundation.

Four years later, Shen says he has grown into his role as a dissident,
and that he approaches his work differently since that trip to China.
"In 1989, we were all on a ride," he says. "We came out, and we failed, and we
were saluted as heroes. We got more recognition than if we had succeeded.
That's an ironic twist. For me, I realize it's not a ride anymore -- it's a
hard journey. Others hang onto the ride,
though there's little to ride on anymore. Being a spontaneous dissident
doesn't mean you can be a mature dissident and carry on the movement."

Part 7 - Changing China

His critics have been saying that for years.

"They were thrown to the fore by a very intense street movement," says Guo
Luoji, a former Nanjing University philosophy professor who is now a research
fellow at Harvard Law School.

Guo, a highly regarded elder of the dissident community here, is 65,
slight, and serene. A student radical in the 1940s, Guo joined the
Communist Party when one of its slogans was `Against one-party rule'; he became
disillusioned during the Cultural Revolution, and published articles critical
of Mao's rule. Even after the Democracy Wall movement of 1979 was crushed, and
Wei Jingsheng was jailed, Guo continued to criticize the party: an article he
wrote called `Political Issues May Be Discussed' -- a heretical concept, and an
open act of defiance -- was published in the People's Daily, a Communist Party
newspaper based in Shanghai. Shortly thereafter, Deng Xiaoping expelled Guo
from Beijing for his views. Banished to Nanjing in 1982, he was forbidden to
publish again.

His Nanjing University students came to him for advice during the
protests of 1989, Guo says. But, he adds, they rarely listened to him,
determined to perform rash -- and often pointless -- acts of defiance.
After the crackdown, one of his graduate students was arrested, and Guo brought
and won a civil lawsuit against the Communist Party for unlawful arrest. He
continued to sue on other matters, chipping away at the party, doing damage.
When Guo came to the United States from Nanjing in 1993, as a visiting scholar
at Columbia, he was forbidden re-entry to China.

Having lived the last 56 years on the front lines of political dissent
in China, even as the enemies shifted over the decades, Guo feels
qualified to assess the student movement of 1989. Many of the young
students who arrived in Tiananmen in the spring, Guo says through a
translator, were political novices. He pulls out a copy of the Press
Freedom Guardian and smooths a page. On the occasion of Deng Xiaoping's death,
nine of the student leaders from 1989, including Chai Ling and Li Lu, published
an announcement about China's future.

"The story of a democratic China," they write, "which began with the
1989 democracy movement, will turn a new page." Began. Guo has the translator
read that sentence a couple of times. "They think they were the first ones to
think about everything," he says. "They think they were the first heroes."

Guo Luoji is one of many dissidents fame has passed clean by, chiefly because
few of them are as telegenic and as good with English as Shen Tong, Chai Ling,
Li Lu, and Wu'er Kaixi. No matter that some of the residents of Boston's
dissident community have done courageous things to reform the government in
China, acts for which they have been imprisoned and exiled. The machinery of
fame is highly selective.

And the selected few have reaped enormous rewards. Chai Ling and Li Lu, who had
been close allies during the Tiananmen demonstrations, have that machinery
figured out. Chai, who is now at Harvard Business School, is working on her
memoirs. Li, a high-powered investment banker, is said to be parlaying his
Tiananmen heroism and compelling story into business
opportunities in the Chinese market economy his oppressor Deng Xiaoping
created. Both are still frequently tapped for TV and other appearances to give
the American public their perspective on China. Neither, however, has a great
deal to do with the Chinese dissident community. Li Lu, for instance, writes
almost exclusively for American audiences.

For Wu'er Kaixi, the machinery did not work so smoothly. Making the mistake of
assuming that his courage in Tiananmen Square could sustain him as a public
hero, Wu'er believed his own hype and paid for it, falling into obscurity and a
succession of poorly paid jobs. Wu'er, now a father and husband, has recovered
control; he lives in Taiwan and hosts a Charlie Rose-style talk show.

Shen Tong had to try a little harder to make the machinery of fame work for
him.  His life did not become quite the star-studded multimedia event Li's and
Chai's did, but of all the dissidents he has remained in closest touch with the
cause of reform in China. His trip back there in 1992, and the fact that his
Democracy for China Fund is still functioning, has ensured that while his
dissident star has not shone brightest here in the West, it well may shine
longest.

Now Wu'er, once the most recognizable face of the movement, works in Taiwan for
Shen's foundation. Both say they are uncomfortable with the accolades and
responsibilities the West has conferred upon them. Both say they are trying to
push more quietly for change in China these days, by supporting underground
reform efforts.

But in the end, what can Shen, Wu'er, or any of the famous four really do for
China? Not much, say their critics. In the pages of the
Chinese-language newspapers and magazines, the future of China, and the best
way to bring reform is hotly debated. And the media stars of 1989 are not very
highly regarded.

"I think people have become aware of their mistakes," says China Focus's Liu
Binyan, who was not allowed to write in China for 22 years because he'd called
for press freedom in the '50s. "When they were still in China, they were too
radical and self-centered, and acted as stars before the world's media. When
they arrived abroad, they behaved like aristocrats, seeming to forget the
ordinary people at home." He cites Wu'er Kaixi's behavior, and the fact that
Chai Ling is never without her little white dog, even at important conferences.

Wu'er acknowledges the harm he did. "As painful as it is, I damaged the image
of dissidents in general," he laments. "The criticism I have
caused to myself also damaged the whole movement."

Other dissidents are less willing to find fault with themselves, even
when they come under very harsh criticism. Ding Zelin, a Beijingloudly, a lot of journalists listen to you. I know American ways. They
like heroes, especially when they fight dictatorships and have stories
from jail.")

He is potential Famous Dissident material, but he says he won't be going that
way. For Wang, as for many other dissidents who have chosen not to join
Dissident, Inc., keeping a low profile is more than a matter of modesty: it is
also a key to their strategies for changing China. "In my opinion," says Wang,
"if we want democracy inside China, we should rely on Chinese people. I want to
keep contact with my colleagues inside China, so I cannot be high-profile
outside China.
Otherwise, the Chinese government will cut off my contact.

"In America," he explains, "if you want to get something done, you have to keep
a high profile." Then he adds, "If you are high-profile, you can get more
money, but you can do nothing in China."

Star power

On June 4, 1989, Deng Xiaoping's government put an end to the Tiananmen Square
protests that had captivated the west for six weeks. A handful of the students
who took part in the demonstrations came to America -- three of them to Boston
-- and became celebrities.

                   Wu'er Kaixi

At the height of the demonstrations, Wu'er, still in his hospital
pajamas, brazenly scolded hardline premier Li Peng as the world (even China)
watched on television. In America, he was much celebrated, but handled his fame
badly and dropped out of sight for a while, leaving Harvard for a series of
low-paying jobs in California. He is now a talk-show host in Taiwan.

                   Chai Ling

In Tiananmen Square, Chai shouted rallying cries to the students and
exhorted them to stay in the square even after Deng's patience was at an end.
After the crackdown, she went to Paris, then Princeton, then ended up in
Boston. She appears regularly on television and in newspapers to talk about
China. She is now at Harvard Business School and is working on a memoir.

                   Li Lu

A close ally of Chai Ling's during the protests, Li came to New York
after the crackdown and became a celebrity, the subject of a glitzy
documentary, Moving the Mountain, produced by Sting's wife, Trudie Styler. He
graduated from Columbia with degrees in both business and law. He is a fixture
on television, called upon frequently to comment on trade or Tiananmen. He is
now an investment banker in Los Angeles.

                   Shen Tong

A friend of Wu'er Kaixi's, Shen was the first student dissident to
arrive in America in 1989; he came to Boston, to study at Brandeis and BU. His
ghost-written memoir, Almost a Revolution, was originally to have been about
Wu'er as well, but the friends had a falling out. In 1992, Shen went back to
China and was detained for seven weeks. He is finishing a PhD in political
science at BU, and heads the Democracy for China Fund, based in Wellesley.

                   -- Yvonne Abraham


Now, as Delong said, lets look at actuality.  Do you think any of these people
can save China or socialism?

Henry C.K. Liu