May 27, 1997

A Dissident In Armani

Eric Ellis last spoke to Li Lu in Tiananmen Square just before the tanks rolled in. He now cuts billion dollar deals in the US.

LI LU apologises for not being able to talk long."I have to quickly get back to the office. I'm closing on a billion-dollar satellite deal."

The last time I saw this Armani-suited dealmaker, he was wasting away inside a putrid canvas tent in Beijing's Tiananmen Square a week before China's People's Liberation Army cleared it of "counter-revolutionaries" like himself. He was then a monolingual physics student at Nanjing University, the son of Soviet-trained engineers who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution.

Active in campus politics at Nanjing, he emerged as one of the Tiananmen movement's most visible leaders, whose credentials were confirmed to many Chinese as "heroes", and to the hard-line communist leadership as "black hands", by the two-week hunger strike I watched him endure.

Then the PLA tanks arrived. With the famous "pyjama boy" Wuerkaixi and Tiananmen's "La Pasionara" Chai Ling, Li escaped the massacre through the secret "underground railway" to Hong Kong and political asylum.

Just 22 at the time, he would lead the dissident movement from Geneva, where his lobbying secured the first and only UN censure of China's human rights record, then to Paris, where he led the Bastille Day march at then President Mitterrand's invitation, and to New York, where he got fast-tracked into Columbia University.

And eight years later, in the pastel Beverly Hills office of investment bank Donaldson Lufkin and Jeanrette, the naive student leader of 1989 has yielded to a polished dealmaker with the bearing of an East Coast Brahmin.

"I've made some money. I like it and I intend to make some more," he said last week. "I'm into being successful."

That much is clear, for Li Lu is China's Fifth Avenue dissident, close friend of rock star Sting, that patron saint of trendy lost causes whose wife Trudie clothed him in her husband's designer castoffs while signing him to film his Tiananmen memoir, Moving the Mountain. With his clipped vowels and precise English, Li is the type of freedom fighter more likely found seated at a polite dinner gathering of concerned Manhattan liberals, a story more likely seen in GQ than the Amnesty International bulletin.

While former colleagues like Wang Dan are tortured inside a Chinese gulag and Wuerkaixi did time serving ribs at a truckers diner outside San Francisco, millionaire Li drives a Lexus through the leafy streets of Beverly Hills.

"I decided I'd spent enough time on the East Coast so I thought I'd give California a try to complete my American experience.

"There's a lot of opportunity to be had here and I believe in the Pacific Century."

He may be a believer in the future prosperity of the Pacific Rim but Li's value to Donaldson Lufkin and Jeanrette comes from his American experiences, not his Chinese ones.

His involvement with Chinese-related business is by definition limited because to Beijing's communists he remains a "public enemy" whose arrest and jail sentence are still sought.

"I've been to Hong Kong on business but I'm not sure I'll be able to go there after June 30" (when China takes back the colony from Britain.)

Li Lu does not lack for confidence, or ambition. "In Tiananmen in 1989, I was 22 and I had the country with me, theoretically, in my hands. We were at our best and I was clearly the leader amongst us. Not many people get that sort of power and experience at such a young age. And when I made it to this fabled US, I discovered that I was a lot smarter than many of the people I met here."

He now has very little to do with his Tiananmen colleagues, though he remains active in the exiled Chinese political community.

"I am very much still a dissident. I'm always spreading the word and I still have a deep bond with China, I have my Chinese soul," he says.

Li says he has a role to play. "In 1989, we were naive. Now, I believe the system can be changed and I would be very happy to return to China to participate in the peaceful evolution of China into a pluralistic society."

Li says he is happy about China's resumption of sovereignty in Hong Kong, but he is "not enthusiastic" about its prospects. "I fear the cadres will find it too difficult to resist fiddling about it in it."