(3 of 4)
Wang Lichao taps his cell phone impatiently as his taxi sputters to a stop in the gridlock of Beijing's Haidian district. The area he is passing through used to be a vegetable field when Wang Dan lived in the capital—back before he was released early from prison and exiled to the U.S. in 1998 as a goodwill gesture before a visit by the then U.S. President Bill Clinton. Today, the road that used to be cucumber-and-tomato farmland is lined with signposts to the Seine Villa residential complex and the Tiger Golf Club Pro Shop. More than almost any other district in Beijing, Haidian has been transformed from a sleepy collection of university campuses and low-slung concrete apartment blocks to a sprawl of high-rise residential towers and high-tech headquarters—the region is dubbed China's Silicon Valley. "I think Wang Dan would be happy about China's development," Wang Lichao says, looking out of the taxi window at five lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Within sight are three Mercedes, two Lexuses, and a tricycle cart carrying a precarious load of mainland-made Konka televisions.
Eleven years after the country boy skipped college to go to Beijing, he is proof of how welcoming China's middle class can be. "When I came to Beijing, I was a blank piece of paper," says Wang Lichao. "But once I started writing on that piece of paper, things started happening very quickly." After his cousin was reimprisoned, Wang Lichao returned to Shandong and worked the only job he could find: selling shoes at a night market. He would buy footwear wholesale from a factory two kilometers away and mark them up by as much as 200%, depending on how gullible the buyer looked. Later, he peddled fax machines and parlayed those profits into a move back to the capital. There, he co-founded an interior design firm, before his recent move into telecom. Outside his office building in Haidian, a giant signboard for the CFA Testing Consultancy promises to coach wannabe business magnates, and techie types stride past carrying their notebook computers. "In China, if you work hard, you have opportunities," says Wang Lichao. "When Wang Dan was a student, you had to depend on the state for a job, even if you were very talented. But now you can start your own business and look out for yourself."
Even though Wang Lichao, at 31, is four years younger than his cousin, he looks more comfortably ensconced. Prosperity has filled out his face; he wears a neatly pressed blue oxford shirt, khaki pants and sports a razor-straight hair part. In 2002 he bought a two-bedroom apartment in Haidian, in a fancy complex with statues of gladiators flanking the entrance. He lives there with his accountant wife and a black-and-white spotted rabbit. His wife knows of Wang Dan's controversial activities, but unlike previous girlfriends, wasn't scared off. "What Wang Dan did was a long time ago," says Wang Lichao. "She knows that our life today isn't connected with those events in the past." Nevertheless, the pair have never told her parents about his connection to Wang Dan. Fifteen years is a long time, but maybe not long enough.
After 40 minutes the taxi finally arrives at its destination, and Wang Lichao rides up a gleaming elevator to the brand-new apartment of his friend, Xu Zhonghua, a bookseller from Heze. Xu was a farmer until eight years ago, and when he was tilling his fields, he had only the vaguest understanding of the 1989 protests. Now, after reading much samizdat literature from Hong Kong and Taiwan, he's articulately discussing politics with Wang Lichao. "They were fighting for all the same things we would like to fix in society today," Xu says, as he digs into a six-course meal cooked by his wife. Wang Lichao nods, chases after a particularly slippery peanut, then continues his friend's train of thought: "China has instituted economic reforms, and we have all profited from that. But before 1989 there was talk of political reform, and now it's never mentioned. Wang Dan is so famous overseas, but here no one even knows who he is and what he stood for."
But Wang Lichao won't be pushing publicly for freedom of speech and other pillars of democracy anytime soon. He may love Wang Dan and respect his ideals, but he has a business to run and a wife and a rabbit to feed. Life, he says, is happy—save for the fact that his best friend is nearly half a world away. Besides, the family needs him to take care of Wang Dan's parents, because their son is in exile. Wang Lichao stops by about once a week to visit his uncle and aunt, who even 15 years after Tiananmen, are under surveillance by the police. "I worry about them and they worry about their son," says Wang Lichao. "I tell them Wang Dan is happy in America, but I think I am happier than he is. How can he be happy when he is so far away from all his family?"