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.

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Star power

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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 naïveté 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

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham@phx.com.