王军涛的激进、孤独和突遭重击的人生

--在长期抵抗中国政权后，一位流亡者在纽约皇后区面对谋杀和间谍(1－2)译文

原文：https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/wang-juntao-exile-chinese-communist-party-nyc.html 

1.

王军涛，1989 年天安门事件的主要组织者、最著名的中国异见人士之一，每周有几天都会从他在新泽西州的家中前往他在纽约法拉盛的办公室。他把车停在停车费最便宜的火车站，然后乘长岛铁路来到法拉盛缅街，出了车站迎面而来的就是鱼和香烟的味道，以及即将降落在La Guardia机场的飞机的轰鸣声。军涛绕过街头小贩和法轮功的展台，沿着第41大道走入饱经风霜的中国民主党，过去十多年他都在领导这个致力于推翻中国共产党统治的组织。

纽约拥有世界上最多的中国流亡人士，而法拉盛就相当于民运（中华人民共和国民主运动）的总部。在天安门事件之后民运曾有数千名坚定的追随者，但这些年来已大幅减少，可能只有几百名活跃分子。军涛的办公室并不是一个光鲜亮丽的空间。它位于一家面馆和网吧的楼上，办公室入口处堆放着箱子，洗手间的一半成了储藏室而堆满抗议工具，如扩音器、标牌、画笔。

军涛通常坐在一张长桌边的折叠椅上，桌子上覆盖着塑料布。64 岁的他顽皮而令人放松，有着明显的梳头和更明显的大肚子。最近我去法拉盛看他时，他拉开帘布露出摆酒的架子，并递给我一杯红酒。“我是职业革命家，”他操着浓重的北京口音说，“你必须喝酒，你必须战斗，你必须坚强。”

酒过数巡后，军涛对我说异见人士过着“悲惨的生活”。在中国时，中共政权曾两次将他关进监狱；数十年来他与家人联系非常有限，以免他们受到官方骚扰。“中国政府绑架了你的亲人，”他说，“如果你爱他们，你就必须假装不爱他们。”他的不少反对派朋友现在已经七八十岁了，每次他们在法拉盛聚会时似乎都会比上次少一个人(即去世了) 。与此同时，来自中国的新闻不断提醒人们共产党日益专制的统治，从新疆的拘留营到以面部识别技术为基础的大规模监控。在近三十年的流亡生活中，军涛一直保持着在中国进行民主革命的梦想，但距离实现这个梦想并没有更近了。

2022年3月以来，军涛连遭重击。先是他在民运最亲密的朋友和同事，从天安门事件之前就一直陪伴在他身边的李进进被谋杀了。两天后，他们圈子中的另一位亲密成员王书君被美国司法部逮捕并被指控为中国情报部门刺探异见人士信息。（军涛和书君没有亲戚关系。）当我第一次拜访他时，军涛仍处于震荡中，试图弄清李进进被谋杀和王书君间谍案的关系，接下来几个月内他一直认为这两件罪行是相关的。但即使在他哀悼之际，他仍然对推动中国民主持乐观态度。他说，他的人生经历了“四起三落”。即使运动处于低潮，政治潮流的转变也只是时间问题。“当运动低潮时，你无法逆转潮流，”他在 8 月表示，“但你可以改变自己，你的不同选择会决定潮流来到时你是否有机会。” 他预测，习近平很快就会失去足够多的支持并面临强烈反对。

在海外华人中，这种信仰很少见，许多人称之为不切实际的。2022年10 月，习近平史无前例地获得了第三个主席(按：应为“中共总书记”)任期，这似乎既打破了改革即将到来的希望，似乎也证实了后天安门一代的新活动人士所青睐的策略，即放弃发起大规模抗议的想法，专注于更现实的目标，比如说服西方公司与新疆的工厂断绝关係，因为新疆正在迫害少数民族。

然而，令人难以置信的是，军涛的预言成真了。2022年11 月，在乌鲁木齐一栋公寓楼的十名居民死于火灾后，中国互联网上充满了指责是习近平严厉的清零政策使这些居民无法从大火中逃出。抗议者遍布全国各地的街头，从工业城市郑州到北京知名的清华大学。有人公开呼吁习近平下台，这是自天安门事件后几乎听不到的无畏言论，令任何目睹中国拥抱经济增长而非政治自由并粉碎异见的人感到震惊。

这些抗议否定了愤世嫉俗者和渐进主义者自以为知道的一切。年轻的抗议者冒着失去自由甚至生命的危险挥舞着标语，在警察面前也不带上面具。更令人吃惊的是，示威似乎奏效了。十天内，世界上最强大的威权政府就改变了其标志性的清零政策，突然解除了封锁限制。

军涛关于在最黑暗的时刻维系民主火焰的陈词滥调突然变成了现实。虽然政治分析家小心翼翼地注意到这场示威中公民不服从的范围是有限的，但新一代人已经吸取了军涛毕生试图传授的教训：改变总是可能的。我们在2022年11 月下旬又见面时，他兴致勃勃，称这次示威是一个“转折点”。

但他更希望李进进能活着看到这个转折。

2.

王军涛成长于特权中，他在北京一所军队院校长大，他的父亲就是军校里的高级官员。他名字的字面意思就是“军队的波涛汹涌”，他曾幻想有一天自己会成为一名伟大的军事人物。“我曾梦想带领中国军队打败西点军校毕业生组成的军队，”他说。1966年文化大革命开始时，他才7岁，他挥舞着旗帜，唱着歌，是一个尽职的红小兵。但他也有逆反倾向，就像武侠史诗中的浪漫情节那样，他面对艰巨的困难做出了英勇的事蹟。1976 年清明节时，上百万人聚集在天安门广场哀悼周恩来，并批评试图与周夺权的所谓“四人帮”，当时军涛带领他的高中同学加入了示威游行。许多抗议者在广场上张贴诗歌，王军涛所贴的四首七律引起关注，其中一首的大意是：“继承遗志，干掉叛徒，斗志昂扬，不惧刀斧。”

这些诗激怒了包括江青在内的几位中共领导，王军涛被捕入狱 224 天——平均而言，他这四首七律的每个字恰好让他坐1天牢。他告诉我，他很“自豪”和“兴奋”在狱中度过他的高三，由此认识到恶名的价值。“我意识到我很特别，”他说。他认为坐牢给了他接触到与大多数人所隔绝的社会另一面的机会，那些囚犯向他展示了在体制之外、独立于中共的生活是可能的。“我从那些罪犯身上学到了很多，”他说。

作为一名年轻的中国民主人士，那时是一个激动人心的时刻。1978 年邓小平开始推行市场改革后，自由主义试验的曙光出现了：村庄开始举行选举，报纸开始调查腐败。北京大学是这场政治震动的中心，在进入北大学习核物理后，军涛迅速确立了自己的学生领袖地位。到 1986 年他已经成为知名活动家，他进而将自己的组织延伸到武汉，在那里，一位朋友把他介绍给了一位名叫李进进的法律讲师。

李进进也来自一个忠于共产党的家庭。在中共于 1949 年掌权之前，他的父亲是一名裁缝。1955 年进进出生时，他的父亲已是是湖北省警察学校的一名教师，并且后来会成为系主任。有一段时间，进进似乎在追随他父亲的脚步。他15岁入伍，当过电报员，后来进入武汉市公安局，负责抓公交车上的扒手。但他的政治历程在湖北财经学院发生了变化，他在那里学习法律并撰写了一篇关于美国宪法的论文。一位曾参与起草1982年中国宪法的北大教授——该宪法引入了任期制等改革——向他展示了改变系统是可能的。进进(从北大法律硕士毕业后)回到武汉教书，一见到军涛，他就认出这也是一位理想主义者。他们喜欢辩论和喝酒。军涛粗鲁挑衅，进进则认真勤奋，但也是个会突然发火的有脾气的学者。

军涛和进进很快都回到北京。军涛帮助成立了一个智库，并为其招揽了政治学家、经济学家和统计学家——这是构建独立于共产党而存在的公民社会的一个大胆设计。进进清瘦英俊，眉毛浓密而富有表情，他回到北京大学攻读法律博士学位，并当选为研究生会主席，这一职位可以使他走上迅速晋身中共领导层的快车道。“如果他没有在 1989 年加入天安门运动，他在中共的前途无量，”一位异见人士告诉我。

1989 年 4 月，在胡耀邦去世后，学生涌入天安门广场要求全面变革：问责制、正当程序、民主。抗议持续了数周。随着抗议者越来越多，王军涛开始在抗议者和政府之间进行调解。他是一个温和的力量，试图通过谈判达成协议，让示威者撤离天安门广场，以换取中共承认学生独立出版物以及其他让步。与此同时，李进进正在努力组织一个名为北京工人自治会的团体。除了几年前曾在太原短暂运作的一个工人团体外，它是中国第一个独立的劳工组织。年轻的纽约时报记者尼古拉斯·克里斯托夫当时听到进进说，“现在我们将创建一个工会，它不再是像以前工会那样的福利组织，而是一个关心工人权利的组织。” 进进组建的联盟吓坏了中共领导：同月在波兰，一个类似的联盟(波兰团结工会)成功地与波兰共产党政府谈判改革。

6 月 3 日，进进骑上自行车前往天安门，开始又一个晚上的抗议活动。途中，他听到枪声，看到学生们朝相反的方向跑去，一些人受伤流血。中国军队向抗议者开火，造成数百人死亡。进进转身回去，他在 2009 年写的六四回忆录没有提供更多细节。

军涛也谨慎地讲述了六四暴行。“比起谈论未来，我厌倦了谈论过去，”他说，“我必须专注于我现在正在做的事情。” 六四那天晚上他在北京，正在一家旅馆等着和朋友见面，这时传来了开枪的消息，他让司机带他去现场。他看到了毁坏的汽车和一名被枪杀的抗议者。接下来的几天，他一直在为其他活动家安排逃跑路线，然后自己换衣服、烫头发，逃离了北京。

大屠杀发生后，中共尽可能多地抓捕抗议者。许多人逃离了这个国家，但有数千人被捕，还有数目不详的人被处决。几天后，李进进被捕，并以“反革命宣传和煽动罪”的罪名被送进北京的监狱。1991 年，在被关押 681 天后，他因政府决定不起诉而获释。接下来两年他从事房地产和在小型学校任教，直到当局允许他与妻子和儿子一起出国，来到美国的哥伦比亚大学。

王军涛在天安门事件后逃了四个月，用化名在山里一个小镇的工厂工作。他被捕后，李鹏总理在一次政治局会议上说，必须对王军涛“毫不留情”。他被指控为操纵天安门抗议者的“黑手”之一，“阴谋颠覆政府”。他和同事陈子明在一场表演性审判中被分别判处 13 年徒刑——是八九抗议者中判刑时间最长的。“这非常荒谬，”一位西方驻华外交官当时告诉在纽时头版就此发表文章的记者克里斯托夫，“中共需要有人为数以百万计的人在街头游行负责，然而他们竟然公开将此仅归结为这两人的煽动。”

The Radical, Lonely, Suddenly Shocking Life of Wang Juntao

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chinese democracy Jan. 26, 2023 

The Radical, Lonely, Suddenly Shocking Life of Wang Juntao

After years of resisting China’s regime, an exile confronts murder and espionage in Queens.

By Christopher Beam 

Wang Juntao in 1976 and today. The text references his first, “unforgettable” term in prison. Photo: Alex Hodor-Lee; Courtesy of Wang Juntao (archive) 

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

A few days a week, Wang Juntao, a primary organizer of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and one of the world’s most renowned Chinese dissidents, travels from his home in New Jersey to his office in Flushing. He drives to the train station with the cheapest parking, then takes the path to the LIRR to Main Street, emerging to the whiff of fish and cigarettes and the roar of planes making their final approach to La Guardia. Skirting a stretch of street vendors and Falun Gong practitioners, Juntao cuts up 41st Avenue toward the weather-beaten headquarters of the Democratic Party of China, the organization he has led for more than a decade, dedicated to the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party.

New York has the greatest number of exiled Chinese activists in the world, and Flushing is the effective headquarters of the minyun — the movement for democracy in the People’s Republic of China. The cause, which counted thousands of adherents in the period after Tiananmen, has dwindled in recent years to include perhaps a few hundred active dissidents. Juntao’s office is not a glamorous space. Located above a noodle shop and an internet café, it has boxes piled in the entryway, and the bathroom doubles as storage for the old-school tools of protest: megaphones, signs, paintbrushes.

Juntao usually sits in a folding chair at the head of a long table that’s covered in fraying plastic. At 64, he is impish and disarming with a prominent comb-over and an even more prominent paunch. When I went to see him in Flushing recently, he pulled back a curtain to reveal shelves of wine and liquor and offered me a cup of red. “I’m a professional revolutionary,” he said in a heavy Beijing accent. “You have to drink, you have to fight, you have to be tough.”

Being a dissident is “a miserable life,” Juntao told me after a couple of rounds. When he still lived in China, the Communist regime put him in prison twice, and for decades he’s had only limited contact with his family to spare them official harassment. “The Chinese government hijacks your relatives,” he said. “If you love them, you have to pretend not to love them.” In Flushing, some of his fellow activists were now in their 70s and 80s, and every time they gathered, there seemed to be another empty seat. Meanwhile, the news from China brings constant reminders of the Communists’ increasingly authoritarian rule, from internment camps in Xinjiang province to mass surveillance powered by facial-recognition technology. For almost three full decades in exile, Juntao has kept alive the dream of a democratic revolution in China, but he is no closer to seeing it realized.

This past March, Juntao was hit with back-to-back shocks. His closest friend and colleague in the minyun, Jim Li, who’d been by his side since before Tiananmen, was murdered. Two days later, another intimate member of their circle, Wang Shujun, was arrested by the Department of Justice and accused of spying on dissidents for China’s intelligence service. (Juntao and Shujun are not related.) When I first visited him, Juntao was reeling, trying to make sense of the killing and the alleged espionage. For months, he indulged a cloak-and-dagger theory that the two crimes were related. But even as he mourned, he remained optimistic about the push for Chinese democracy. His life, he said, has had “four ups and three downs.” Even if the movement was at an ebb, it was only a matter of time before the political tide changed. “When it’s down, you cannot make a difference,” he said in August. “But you can make a difference in yourself. And the difference in yourself will determine if you’ll have a chance when it’s up.” Soon, he predicted, President Xi Jinping would lose enough support that he would face a backlash.

In the Chinese diaspora, that kind of faith is rare. Many would call it quixotic. In October, Xi secured an unprecedented third term as president, seeming to extinguish hopes of reform in the near future. It also seemed to validate a strategy favored by a new, post–Tiananmen generation of activists: to abandon the idea of a widespread uprising and focus on more realistic goals, like persuading western companies to cut ties with factories in areas where ethnic minorities are being persecuted.

Then, incredibly, Juntao’s prediction came true. In November, after ten residents of an apartment building in Ürümqi died in a fire, the Chinese internet lit up with accusations that Xi’s stringent “zero COVID” policies had made it hard for them to escape the blaze. Protesters filled streets across the country, from the industrial city of Zhengzhou to the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing. Some called for Xi to step down. It was fearless rhetoric of a kind nearly absent since Tiananmen and shocking to anyone who has watched China embrace growth over political liberty and seen it crush dissent.

The rallies belied everything the cynics and incrementalists thought they knew. Young protesters were waving signs and appearing maskless in front of police, risking their freedom and maybe their lives. Even more astonishing, the demonstrations seemed to work. Within ten days, the strongest authoritarian government in the world reversed course on one of its signature policies, abruptly easing lockdown restrictions.

Juntao’s platitudes about keeping the democratic flame alive during the darkest hours suddenly felt true. And while political analysts were careful to note the limited scope of the civil disobedience, a new generation had learned the lesson Juntao has spent his life trying to impart: that change is always possible. The next time we met, in late November, he was buoyant, calling the eruption a “turning point.”

He only wished Jim Li had lived to see it.

Wang Juntao in Times Square. Photo: Alex Hodor-Lee 

Juntao grew up privileged on the campus of a Beijing military academy where his father was a high-ranking official. His name means “billowing wave of the army,” and he imagined that one day he would be a great military figure. “I dreamed of leading the Chinese army to defeat West Point graduates,” he said. Juntao was 7 when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and he waved flags and sang songs as a dutiful Little Red Guard. But he also had a contrarian streak, devouring romantic wuxia epics in which wandering knights perform heroic deeds against daunting odds. In 1976, when a reported 1 million people filled Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of Zhou Enlai and criticize the so-called Gang of Four that had battled him for control of the government, Juntao led his high-school classmates in joining the demonstrations. Many of the protesters posted poems in the square, and the four Juntao put up are considered some of the most famous. One of them read, in part: “I swear to slaughter the traitors to fulfill the wishes of my elders / Armed with high spirits, I have no fear of knives or axes.”

His poems angered several members of the Communist elite, including Mao Zedong’s wife, and Juntao was jailed for 224 days — one for every word. He told me he was “proud” and “excited” to spend his senior year in prison, recognizing the value of notoriety. “I realized I would be very special,” he said. He saw it as an opportunity to learn about aspects of society that were closed off to most people, and the other inmates showed him that it was possible to live outside the system, independent from the party. “I learned a lot from those criminals,” he said.

It was a thrilling time to be a young democrat in China. After Deng Xiaoping began introducing market reforms in 1978, glimmers of liberal experimentation appeared: Villages began holding elections, and newspapers started investigating corruption. Peking University was the center of this political ferment, and after enrolling there to study nuclear physics, Juntao quickly established himself as a campus leader. By 1986, he had become a celebrity activist, and he took his organizing to Wuhan, where a friend introduced to Jim, who was then a law instructor.

Jim—who then went by his Chinese name, Jinjin — also came from a family loyal to the Communists. Before they took over in 1949, his father had been a tailor. By the time Jim was born, in 1955, he was a teacher at the police academy of Hubei province on his way to becoming a department head. For a time, it looked like Jim would follow in his father’s footsteps. He enlisted in the army at 15, serving as a telegraph operator, and later joined the Wuhan police department, assigned to catch pickpockets on city buses. But his politics changed at the Hubei College of Business and Finance, where he studied law and wrote a thesis on the U.S. Constitution. A professor who worked on China’s 1982 Constitution — which introduced reforms like term limits—showed him that changing the system was possible. Jim returned to Wuhan to teach. Upon meeting Juntao, he recognized a fellow idealist. They loved debating and drinking. Juntao was brash and provocative; Jim was serious and diligent, a scholar with a temper that could erupt unexpectedly.

Juntao and Jim soon moved to Beijing. Juntao helped start a think tank and staffed it with political scientists, economists, and statisticians — a bold new example of civil society existing independent of the Communist Party. Jim, who was lean and handsome with thick, expressive eyebrows, pursued a doctorate in law at Peking University, where he was elected president of the graduate-student body, a position that put him on the fast track to Party leadership. “If he had not joined the Tiananmen movement in 1989, his future would have been limitless,” a fellow activist told me.

In April 1989, after the death of Hu Yaobang, a liberal Party elder who had championed many of the country’s free-market reforms, students flooded into Tiananmen Square to demand wholesale change: accountability, due process, democracy. The protests lasted for weeks. As the crowds grew, Juntao, who was all but living at the square, began mediating between protesters and the government. He was a moderating force, ultimately trying to negotiate a deal in which the demonstrators would evacuate in return for the Party granting more independence to student publications, among other concessions. Meanwhile, Jim was working to organize a union called the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation. Aside from a group that had briefly operated in Taiyuan years before, it was the first independent labor organization in the country. “Our old unions were welfare organizations,” Jim told a young New York Times reporter named Nicholas Kristof. “But now we will create a union that is not a welfare organization but one concerned with workers’ rights.” Jim’s alliance scared Beijing’s Party elite: That same month in Poland, a similar coalition had successfully negotiated for reforms with the Communist government.

On June 3, Jim got on his bike and headed toward Tiananmen for another night of protests. On the way, he heard gunshots and saw students running in the opposite direction, some injured and bloodied. The Chinese military had opened fire on protesters, killing hundreds. Jim turned back. A memoir he wrote in 2009 offers no further details.

Juntao tells his account of the atrocity sparingly too. “I’m sick of talking about the past before I get to the future,” he said. “I have to focus on what I’m doing now.” That night in Beijing, he was waiting to meet a friend at a hotel when word came of a shooting, and he asked his driver to take him to the scene. He saw wrecked cars and a protester who’d been shot dead. He spent the next few days trying to arrange escape routes for activists, then changed his clothes, permed his hair, and fled the city.

After the massacre, the Communist Party rounded up as many protesters as it could. Many escaped the country, but thousands were arrested and an unknown number were executed. Jim was caught after a few days and sent to prison in Beijing on charges of “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement.” In 1991, after 681 days behind bars, he was released when the government decided not to prosecute. He sold real estate and taught at small schools for two years, until the authorities allowed him to leave the country, along with his wife and son, and attend Columbia University.

Juntao spent four months after Tiananmen on the lam, working under a fake name at a factory in a small mountain town. After Juntao’s arrest, Premier Li Peng said at a Politburo meeting that he “must be shown no mercy.” Prosecutors accused him of being one of the “black hands” manipulating the Tiananmen protesters and charged him with “plotting to subvert the government.” A show trial resulted in a sentence of 13 years for him and a colleague, Chen Ziming — the longest of anyone involved. “It’s an absurdity,” a western diplomat told Kristof, who wrote about the case for the front page of the Times. “They needed somebody to blame for millions of people marching on the streets, and in public it’s come down to blaming these two guys.”

In prison, Juntao contracted hepatitis B that went untreated for months. He agitated for proper medical care, writing letters to top officials and staging repeated hunger strikes. The authorities put him in solitary confinement to prevent him from influencing fellow prisoners, but it didn’t work: The other inmates regarded him as a “king,” he told me. Even some guards treated him with respect, calling him “No. 2.” (Chairman Mao was No. 1.) Juntao sent holiday cards to his interrogators, writing, “I think of us as friends, not enemies.”

In 1994, after relentless petitioning by his then-wife, Hou Xiaotian, and international pressure on China to improve its human-rights record in exchange for trade privileges, Juntao was released from prison early to seek medical treatment in the U.S. He immediately took a flight to New York and was so excited to begin his new life that he didn’t sleep for 24 hours.

Jim Li at Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

At Columbia, Jim found that the celebrity of his Tiananmen activism afforded him no great status. He and his family lived in an apartment near the university, and to make rent he delivered food for a Peking-duck restaurant. Later, they moved to the Midwest so Jim could get two degrees (a master’s of law and a doctorate) at the University of Wisconsin; eventually they settled in Queens, where they crammed into a one-bedroom apartment, sleeping on a borrowed mattress.

Juntao spent three years at Harvard, where he earned a master’s in public administration, then got another master’s and a Ph.D. in political science at Columbia. When he and Jim finally reunited in New York, then in their late 30s, they picked up their boozy bull sessions, conspiring to influence Chinese politics from afar. Hou described the pair as “like brothers.” They lobbied members of Congress to support fledgling pro-democracy groups in China and to pass resolutions promoting human rights there. A 1995 profile in the Washington Post described Juntao briefing a group of representatives, including Nancy Pelosi, in a small room at the Capitol and laying out a complicated strategy to use the expected death of Deng Xiaoping to unite reformers within and without the Communist Party and trigger a democratic reckoning.

In Flushing, Juntao and Jim organized events commemorating the anniversaries of the Tiananmen massacre and met with visiting Chinese dissidents. They teamed up to create advocacy groups, including the Chinese Constitutionalist Association and China Judicial Watch, and joined many more; Jim wrote the charter for the Federation for a Democratic China. But as one similar-sounding organization after another was founded, with similar personnel and similarly vague aims, China grew exponentially more powerful, navigating its way from global pariah to iPhone-making, Olympics-hosting juggernaut. The dissidents of the minyun had fiery rhetoric, but with Democratic and Republican administrations alike looking past human-rights issues to encourage investment, they were shouting in vain.

Juntao and Jim’s ambitions began to diverge. Juntao was an absolutist, always calling for total victory over the Communists. In 2010, he created a new branch of the Democratic Party of China — an organization that had started 12 years earlier in Hangzhou, had been promptly banned, and was then claimed by at least half a dozen splinter groups in Flushing alone. Juntao’s iteration grew to eclipse the others, with a shifting roster of a few hundred members. He began organizing weekly protests in New York and D.C., leading “study sessions” for members to learn about democracy, and offering news analysis on Chinese-language talk shows. His office became a clubhouse and de facto social-services center for new immigrants. He dispensed advice about where to live, how to find a job, and which lawyers were most dependable. “I’m their priest,” Juntao said. “I give them faith.”

Jim remained deeply opposed to the Communists. (Juntao recalls that Jim once saw an old couple dancing to a traditional Communist song in Chinatown and yelled, “Go back to China, fuck you!”) But his true calling had always been the law, not politics. He started a legal practice in Flushing on a shoestring budget and soon developed a reputation as a rigorous attorney specializing in immigration, asylum, and sensitive “Red Notice” cases protecting clients from being extradited to China. But he was a bad businessman, hiring friends and family and taking on too many cases for free. To attract more paying clients, Jim began attending social events hosted by a “hometown committee” — an organization friendly with the Communist Party. When his dissident allies objected, Jim told them, not very convincingly, that he was trying to influence the group’s politics from the inside.

Within a few years, he had saved enough to buy a house in Jericho, Long Island, and had taken up skiing and golf. When his parents immigrated, Jim bought a house for them, too, on a leafy street in Flushing. Jim’s father, bitter that his son’s activism had hurt his career, often warned him not to do anything “against China.” Jim would reply that he was working not against China but against the Communist Party. Either way, Jim grew more moderate as he got older. In 2006, he co-founded the Hu Yaobang & Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, an organization dedicated to persuasion and reform, not revolution.

Jim also drifted to the right in U.S. politics. He voted for Donald Trump, largely because of his aggressive stance on China. On January 6, 2021, Jim posted on Twitter a video of the insurrection at the Capitol. He condemned the violence but objected to media descriptions of the crowd as a “mob.” “When students occupied the Square in 1989, the Communist Party said they were thugs,” he wrote in Chinese, adding, “Today we are not trying to overthrow the American Constitution, we are just expressing it.”

Jim in 2020. Photo: Jim Li & Associates 

For younger Chinese activists, the Tiananmen generation is no longer the vanguard. In September, I went to Washington to visit Jewher Ilham, a prominent young advocate for Uyghur rights. On the fourth floor of a modern office building on K Street, Ilham, who is 28, explained how she helped persuade more than a dozen fashion brands to stop sourcing their products from Xinjiang province, where the government has reportedly operated forced-labor camps. “Some of them freaked out, like, ‘Oh my God, what should we do?’ ” she said. “Either for ethical reasons or because they’re smart enough to see there’s a global trend that’s coming.”

Ilham, who works at the Worker Rights Consortium, left for the U.S. in 2013 after her father, the economist Ilham Tohti, was detained by police at a Beijing airport. She has since campaigned for his release and the fair treatment of Uyghurs, whose suppression by the Chinese government the U.S. has called a “genocide.” When I mentioned the 1989 generation, she grew reticent. “I think we work separately,” she said diplomatically. “There’s a gap.” Some pro-democracy leaders have questioned aspects of the Uyghur-rights movement. Wei Jingsheng, who led the influential Democracy Wall movement in Beijing in 1978, has suggested, spuriously, that the Uyghurs have committed genocidal acts of their own; he has been accused by Uyghur activists of parroting Communist talking points about their history.

Other younger dissidents are concerned more with practical, day-to-day issues than with toppling the Party. At the McDonald’s on Flushing’s Main Street, I spoke with Yang Zhanqing, 44, a leader of the “rights defense” movement, which focuses on protecting Chinese citizens from land seizures, sex-based discrimination, and police abuse, using Chinese law to push back against the government. Yang and his cohort keep a purposely low profile. Whereas Juntao’s crew shouts in Times Square every weekend, Yang asked me not to mention details of his group’s recent activities, fearing retaliation.

The Trump era only widened the rift between the minyun’s old guard and the youth. Teng Biao, a human-rights activist and professor at the University of Chicago, says that many older dissidents support Trump because they adhere to a “conservative brand of western liberalism.” Having come of age under Mao-style socialism, when enemies of the regime were labeled “rightists,” they came to associate the right with virtue and to conflate progressive ideas with authoritarianism. Now, when Teng goes out to dinner with friends, he says, “we have to consider, ‘Oh, this person is a Trump supporter, this person is not.’ That’s a big harm to the dissident community.”

A young Chinese feminist activist I spoke with did not even want to be mentioned in the same article as the minyun. “We don’t see those people as our role models,” they said. The generations may share some experiences of being persecuted by the Communists, they explained, “but if they’re expecting us to learn from them — no.”

The activist also rolled their eyes at the old guard’s relative disinterest in progressive causes like racial justice. When I asked Juntao about Black Lives Matter, he said he supports the idea but is concerned about “security”: “If you tie the policeman’s hands, then criminals get their chance.” Countless American-born boomers have fallen out of ideological step with millennials and Gen Z; it’s that much harder for those speaking U.S. politics as a second language.

But the minyun needs fresh blood to survive. That is why, early last year, when a young woman arrived in Flushing eager to join the movement, Juntao and Jim gave her a warm welcome.

Zhang Xiaoning. 

In January 2022, a 25-year-old named Zhang Xiaoning showed up at Jim’s office and asked for a meeting. She said that she’d been raped by a police officer in Beijing and that when she filed a complaint, the government covered it up and put her in a mental institution. Zhang got out and flew to the U.S. in August 2021. She’d been trying to bring attention to her ordeal, protesting in front of the U.N. and the White House. Now she needed a lawyer to help her apply for political asylum.

Jim was sympathetic but wary. Zhang seemed to have “emotional problems,” he wrote in a memo. But untreated mental-health issues are common in China, and while there were some discrepancies in Zhang’s story — in some paperwork, she complained of “sexual harassment” instead of rape — Jim trusted her. He agreed to take on Zhang’s case for free.

Over the coming weeks, they met several times to work on her asylum application, and Zhang acted more and more strangely, according to Jim’s memo. She asked whether Jim felt guilty about participating in the pro-democracy movement, given the “pain” it had caused his family. The memo goes on to describe Zhang emailing him complaining about other members of the minyun and calling them dogs; one evening, according to the memo, she phoned Jim nine times, then sent an email calling him a “loser.”

Zhang was living at a hostel on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing, sharing a room with several other women for around $450 a month, according to a fellow lodger named Victor. She had few possessions — a handful of plastic bags and a coat — and almost no money. She didn’t use her real name when interacting with roommates, instead calling herself “An-An.” Victor heard from the landlord that she was obsessed with Jim Li, showing pictures of the lawyer to her roommates and landlord and saying she was in love and wanted to marry him. (Jim’s first marriage ended in divorce, and he later remarried. I never saw any evidence that he was romantically involved with Zhang.)

On February 18, Zhang told Jim that the rape story was false. She’d heard of such things happening to other women, she said, but it hadn’t happened to her. Jim said he could no longer represent her. Zhang begged him to reconsider. Now that she’d publicly denounced the Communists, she would almost certainly be persecuted if she returned to China. In New York, she’d already been harassed by officials from the Chinese consulate, she said, and back home the Party had been giving her parents trouble. Having fabricated her case to boost her chances of winning asylum, she was now facing deportation — a worst-case scenario.

Zhang returned to Jim’s office repeatedly to try to change his mind. On March 11, she lost her temper and allegedly tried to strangle him. An employee called the police, but when they arrived, Jim asked them to let Zhang go. Later that day, Zhang called Juntao, almost crying, and asked for help. They’d spoken once before, and she knew that he and Jim were close. During an hour-and-a-half-long conversation, Juntao reassured her that she could make amends. All she had to do was bring Jim a dessert and apologize, he said, and the lawyer would come around.

Juntao also suggested that Zhang join a protest he was planning for the next day. In Times Square, they met in person for the first time. Zhang was slight and nervous-looking, with rimless glasses. Wearing a blue face mask, she stood in front of a TKTS sign, raised a fist, and chanted, along with Juntao and a couple dozen others, “Free, free China! Democracy China!” At one point, Zhang removed her mask, exposing her face to the cameras. Juntao took it as a sign of her commitment and felt a surge of pride.

The following Monday, March 14, Juntao was driving when a friend called to say that Jim had been attacked. Juntao pulled into a parking lot and called Jim’s phone. No one answered, so he tried the office. Someone picked up and told him in a shaky voice that Jim was “gone.”

Zhang had shown up at Jim’s building that morning carrying a cake and saying she wanted to apologize — just as Juntao had suggested. Jim invited her into his office. A few minutes later, the secretary heard them arguing and then a shout. She opened the door to discover Jim in his swivel chair, covered in blood, with Zhang standing beside him holding a knife. Another employee charged in and restrained her while the secretary called 911.

Jim was pronounced dead at the hospital. The next day, Zhang was charged with his murder.

Wang Shujun. Photo: Alex Hodor-Lee 

The days following the homicide were filled with bewildering developments. Before Zhang’s arraignment, a crowd of journalists and onlookers waited for her to exit the police station. As she passed the cameras, someone yelled, “Do you regret what you did?” Zhang shouted back, “You’re the ones who should feel regret!” As police wrestled her toward a waiting car, she called her critics “traitors” and accused them of “killing students.” Her meaning was obscure, but many assumed she was blaming the minyun for the deaths of Chinese citizens killed by soldiers in 1989.

On March 16, Juntao visited Jim’s office, taking in the large brown bloodstain on the carpet and laying flowers at a makeshift shrine. Jim’s employees told him they had found a strange clue: a couple of flags Zhang had left behind representing China and the Communist Party.

At almost the same moment, federal prosecutors in Washington held a press conference to announce the arrest of five men on charges of harassing and spying on Chinese dissidents in America. Juntao knew one of them well: Wang Shujun, a kindly historian who served as secretary-general of the foundation Jim had led. According to the Department of Justice, since 2005, Shujun had been collecting intelligence for China’s Ministry of State Security about dissidents in New York — which, if true, would almost certainly have included Jim.

Shujun’s arrest, combined with Zhang’s perp walk and the flags, fueled wild theories about Jim’s death. “When the FBI was about to close the net on Wang Shujun and the foundation, Li Jinjin was suddenly silenced,” one Twitter user wrote in Chinese, referring to Jim by his Chinese name. A local journalist wrote a song speculating about a connection: “They tell the press it’s just a coincidence / But denying the link to the murder makes no sense.”

When I met Juntao for dinner one night in April, he said he’d concluded that Jim was assassinated. “The dissident community has a consensus that this is political murder,” he said. Juntao said he believed the Party eliminated Jim because he was helping the U.S. government expose moles in the minyun.

The notion that Beijing ordered Jim’s killing is far-fetched. Nicholas Eftimiades, a former intelligence officer who studies Chinese espionage, said the odds of China sending an agent to assassinate an American citizen on U.S. soil are “pretty, pretty slight.” “If that was to become public, that would sink the relationship between the U.S. and China,” he said. “They’re not stupid.” When I presented this argument to Juntao, he took the classic conspiracist line: That’s what they want you to think. If Zhang didn’t behave like an assassin — attacking Jim after several people saw her enter his office with no evident plan for escape — that was just further proof of her professionalism.

As with any good activist, Juntao’s superpower has always been his ability to see what others don’t — to imagine the world as different from what it is. But that skill has a flip side. At one point, Juntao admitted that he can talk himself into believing what he wants to be true. “Sometimes people like me confuse subjective impression with objective reality,” he said. “If we believe something is true, it’s actually based on our hope, not on reality.”

The more theorizing I heard from Jim’s friends and colleagues, the more it started to sound like a form of grief. One reason his death hit the community so hard was that he didn’t live to see a democratic China. Jim’s peers were confronting the likelihood that they too wouldn’t see it in their lifetimes. They were mourning not just a friend, but also the cause.

After all they’d suffered, Jim’s death needed to have meaning. If it had been a state-sanctioned assassination, then he died for a reason. The hardest thing to accept would be that he had died at the hands of a disturbed maniac — in other words, for nothing.

Zhang, who pleaded not guilty, is detained at Rikers Island while her case progresses. She wrote me two letters, in perfect penmanship, declining to answer questions. But she did say she was disillusioned with the minyun. It’s not hard to understand how someone in her position would be frustrated: Groups like Juntao’s Democratic Party of China promise to help immigrants apply for asylum and trot them out in front of cameras to denounce the Communist Party. If their applications fail, they might well feel trapped and desperate, unable to live in the U.S. legally and unable to safely return to China.

Some of Juntao’s dissident peers have argued that this practice of boosting asylum applications in exchange for party dues and donations — Juntao calls them optional “thank-you gifts” — exploits immigrants and sullies the purity of the cause. Juntao bristles at this criticism, saying that even if new arrivals join his group for self-interested reasons, he can still persuade them to embrace democracy. He likewise rejects the argument that his entire project has failed because the Chinese Communist Party still rules. “People blame us, saying China is still under the CCP. I say, ‘Who do you think I am?’ I’m not a rainmaker. I’m not a god,” he told me once, in a rare flash of anger. “If someone says, ‘The CCP becomes stronger and stronger,’ I say, ‘Your fault is much bigger than mine. I did my best, but you did nothing.’”

If there’s no evidence that Zhang was a trained killer, the U.S. government’s case that Wang Shujun is a Chinese operative is richly documented. So is the fact that the People’s Republic cares deeply about the activist scene in New York and commits extensive resources to monitoring it. In 2020, the Justice Department charged a New York police officer with gathering intelligence on the city’s Tibetan community for the Chinese government. (Prosecutors recently moved to drop the case, citing new, unspecified “additional information.”) In October, federal authorities accused a father and daughter living in Queens and on Long Island of participating in “Operation Fox Hunt” — a covert Chinese campaign to harass dissidents and other Chinese nationals and coerce them into returning to the mainland. And this month, the Times reported that the FBI had raided a suspected Chinese “police outpost” at a building on East Broadway, one of more than 100 such offices around the world that surveil the Chinese diaspora.

Shujun was always more scholar than activist. After studying military history at one of China’s top academic institutions, he moved to New York in 1994. He published more than a half-dozen books of popular history, some of which sold well in Hong Kong and mainland China. In 2006, a dissident friend recommended him to serve as secretary general of the new Hu Zhao Foundation — of which Jim was also a founding member — and he accepted. According to the FBI, Shujun started collecting information about the activist community and passing it to Chinese officials. An indictment filed in May alleges that between 2005 and 2022, Shujun met with Ministry of State Security officers during trips to China, communicated with them on a messaging app, and shared information in the form of “diaries” he’d save to an email-drafts folder that Chinese agents could access. The indictment alleges that this amounts to conspiracy and failure to register as a foreign agent, among other crimes. (Shujun denies the charges and many details of the FBI’s account. His lawyer, Kevin Tung, said, “My client maintains his innocence and would like a judge to decide his case.”)

Some Flushing dissidents say they long suspected Shujun. “He didn’t speak honestly,” said one, Edmound Jiang, who thought Shujun treated him too much like a celebrity when he arrived in the United States. “It wasn’t natural. I’m just a regular person.” (Not long after we spoke, Jiang fell and died.) Juntao also doubted Shujun’s loyalty, partly because he traveled to China regularly and partly because he would ask about the nitty-gritty of minyun activities. “Nobody cares about the details except a spy,” Juntao said.

In 2012, Juntao shared his concerns with Jim. They were planning to hold a conference (“Deadlock, Breakthrough, and China’s Democratic Transformation”) with guests invited from around the world, including mainland China. Juntao was worried that the Chinese government would stop some of them from leaving the country, so he told Jim not to share the roster with Shujun. According to Juntao, Jim brushed him off. When the guests applied for permission to leave China, they were rejected. Juntao suspects Shujun alerted the authorities. (Shujun disputes this account, saying he did not see the guest list and that any rejections had nothing to do with him.)

On July 31, 2021, while Shujun was staying at his daughter’s house in Norwich, Connecticut, a young man knocked on the door. According to the DOJ’s version of events, when Shujun opened it, the man said he was sent by “the boss” to deliver a message. Shujun invited him in. The man said “headquarters” wanted to warn Shujun that the FBI had been monitoring him and offered to help him delete his “diaries” and other messages, according to the indictment. Shujun allegedly provided the young man with his passwords and told him to delete some of the diaries, but not so many that it would look suspicious. The young man — an undercover FBI agent — recorded the entire conversation.

Months elapsed, and Shujun was not arrested; then, two days after Jim was killed, he was. The Justice Department declined to answer my question about whether the two events were related.

On a sweltering morning in August, I went to Shujun’s apartment in Flushing, where he is free on bail. In his dimly lit living room, he turned on a fan, set down three cups on a table beside me — coffee, tea, and room-temperature Pepsi — and sat in a chair directly opposite me, our knees almost touching. At times, he leaned in so far that our faces were only a foot or two apart. He spoke energetically, with large gesticulations, which, along with his thick black hair, made him seem younger than his 74 years.

The DOJ’s case is all a big misunderstanding, Shujun told me. Sure, he’s met three of the four MSS officers mentioned in the indictment. And yes, he did have multiple lunches with one who was helping Shujun’s son-in-law in Hong Kong collect debts. But he never accepted money from them, he said, and the information he shared was all public. (On this last point, the DOJ disagrees.) Plus Shujun emphasized that it was his job to spread the news of pro-democracy activities. Jim had encouraged Shujun to tell Chinese officials about their work, he said. “If Li Jinjin were still alive, he’d be my biggest defender.”

To my surprise, Juntao defended Shujun. Even if Shujun was taking money from the Communist Party, it probably wasn’t for political reasons but rather as “a business,” Juntao said. “It’s the Chinese way,” he said. And anyway, Juntao said, he’d rather have an informant be someone he knows. That way, “I control what kind of information they get.” He said he still considers Shujun a friend who supports democracy. I found Juntao’s forbearance strange at first, but perhaps it makes sense for someone tired of losing friends.

Jim’s funeral in late March was an extravagant affair. Some 300 mourners gathered at the Chun Fook Funeral Home in Flushing, spilling out of the main room into the lobby, and countless wreaths and hand-painted poetry banners decorated the walls.

Juntao hung off to the side with a huddle of activists, grousing. Jim’s family wanted the ceremony to be strictly apolitical; in some ways, it even favored the Communist Party. The music was a dirge typically played at the funerals of Party leaders, and at one point, a guest carrying a sign with the famous Tiananmen “tank man” photo was escorted out. A signed obituary circulated, listing Jim’s legal colleagues above the pro-democracy crew.

Some members of the minyun thought the sanitized occasion was an insult to everything Jim had believed. He might have lost some of his revolutionary zeal as he adapted to a life of homeownership and golf, but he still loathed the Communists. When Juntao went up to speak, he ignored the no-politics rule and gave a rousing eulogy praising Jim’s quest for freedom and justice, invoking the memories of fellow dissidents and imagining a day when they could hold a public funeral for all of them back in China.

Later, Juntao and his minyun colleagues held a second, explicitly political memorial. In an upstairs ballroom at a mall down the street from his office, they told stories about Jim’s activism in Wuhan and Beijing and how he’d kept up the fight in the United States.

Absent from either ceremony was Jim’s elderly mother, who lived just a mile away. After some discussion, Jim’s friends and family had decided not to tell her that her son was dead. Instead, they told her he had gone abroad.

All summer and fall, week after week, Juntao held his usual rallies in Washington and New York, unfurling the same banners and chanting the same slogans. After the breakthrough COVID protests swept across China in November, we met in his office one last time. I asked if the burst of public dissent vindicated his long-term approach to change. Juntao replied that every generation has to come by its democratic awakening organically, often after some experience of repression. “Some ideas passed from us to them,” he said. “But they may not even know.”

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 30, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.

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