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Wang Dan was a skinny, bespectacled, city kid, but he returned to his mother's native Shandong province every summer. Heze, the family's ancestral town, lies in the breadbasket of China, lush with wheatfields and apple orchards. Even in the leanest years of the People's Republic, people there had food. But they didn't have much else. In the 1980s, Wang Lichao's father eked out a living at an auto factory making shock absorbers. His salary was $3 a month. When Wang Dan came for the summer, though, he noticed little of the poverty, only a place of endless green where he could breathe freely. Together, the cousins climbed trees, herded the family's one scrawny goat and threw stones at frogs. Sometimes, when they were resting on a bough of an old persimmon tree or wading through streams, Wang Dan would tell his cousin about life in Beijing: watching movies, drinking sodas, darting through bicycle traffic. In return, Wang Lichao, broader and more muscular than his cousin, would boast about his latest schoolyard fight. But Wang Dan didn't approve of fisticuffs. "I got into scrapes nearly every week," says Wang Lichao. "But Wang Dan would never hit anyone. He used words to fight instead."
In the spring of 1989, Wang Lichao learned just how potent those words could be. For years his cousin had written him once or twice a week, musing about everything from what Wang Lichao should study in college—history like him, of course—to why he was beginning to question the efficacy of Marxism. But in April 1989 the letters stopped arriving. Finally, Wang Lichao received a hastily scrawled note from his cousin, saying he should turn on the radio if he didn't already know what was happening. That night, Wang Lichao listened to the news and heard how university students were streaming into Tiananmen Square, demanding radical reforms that included a path toward democracy. One of the leaders, Wang Lichao heard, was a 20-year-old Peking University history major called Wang Dan. As the protests in Beijing metastasized into a full-fledged movement, Wang Lichao, inspired by his cousin, scribbled a pro-democracy aphorism on his school blackboard. Those few words, however, were the extent of Wang Lichao's activism, and he escaped with a mild rebuke from his teacher. Several days later he heard his cousin's name again on the radio, this time branded as China's Enemy No. 1.
Many student leaders escaped after June 4, fleeing to the U.S. or Europe. Wang Dan was not among them. Arrested a month after the protests ended, he spent four years in jail, some of the time in solitary confinement in a cell less than 5 sq m. In 1993, just as Wang Lichao was graduating from high school and cramming for his college-entrance exams, Wang Dan was released from prison. Immediately, he returned to Heze and persuaded his cousin to come to Beijing to keep him company. A few weeks later, the 19-year-old visited the capital for the first time. College could wait, and indeed Wang Lichao never returned to school. The cousins lived together for two years. Wang Dan introduced him to his democracy-salon friends and gave him a pile of history and political-science books. Pretty soon, Wang Lichao was helping Wang Dan type up his essays on democracy to distribute to overseas publications.
Wang Lichao's most important role, however, was as an occasional body double and crack antipolice strategist. Late one night, five years after the massacre, the usual scrum of policemen were stationed in front of the Wangs' apartment. Wang Dan sent his cousin down to check on the cops' wakefulness. By 4 a.m., Wang Lichao reported that the plainclothes officers were asleep, so the pair sneaked out. After a two-day drinking binge with friends from Heze, the two headed north to the Yellow River Hotel, a remote inn nestled in the forested hills of Jinan province. By the time the Public Security Bureau caught up with them, nearly a week had passed. So angry were the cops that they shuttered the Yellow River Hotel for months for daring to allow a "black hand" like Wang Dan to check in. "It sounds funny, but those were some of our happiest times together," says Wang Lichao. "We were both young and idealistic, and it felt like nothing could touch us even though terrible things had happened and were still happening all around us."
A year later, the happy interlude ended. Wang Dan was rearrested and eventually sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting "public opinion in plotting to subvert China's people's government and socialist system." Without his cousin's support, Wang Lichao was forced to return home to Heze. Once, he had been the smartest boy in his class. Now, he was back with no degree, no job, and rumors from the local Public Security Bureau that he was a liumang (hooligan) whose trouble-making ways weren't suited for a placid place like Heze.