Cashing in on Tiananmen

Part 4 - Dissident PR

by Yvonne Abraham

No one knows exactly what became of the lone white-shirted worker. He stood his ground for several minutes; then other demonstrators pulled him back off the road. He disappeared into the crowd, his brief, glorious career as embodiment of democratic ideals over -- at least in China.

But in the West, his image became a star. The man in front of the tanks became the Man in Front of the Tanks, and he had a hectic schedule of public appearances: he popped up in a Benetton advertisement, a Wim Wenders movie, a Neil Young song, and speeches by George Bush. Everyone wanted to be associated with this star of 1989, who, despite the Western media's strenuous efforts to find him, remained hidden.

Americans were not about to let the student dissidents get away so easily. Just as the Man in Front of the Tanks was ripe for appropriation by all kinds of people, so too were the dissidents. They were much in demand -- not just by print media and TV, but also by individuals hoping some of their cachet would rub off on them.

Enter the patrons, who, from a certain angle, looked suspiciously like that most American of paraprofessionals: the handler. The most successful dissidents formed friendships with Americans who -- depending on whom you talk to -- either guided them through the circus or helped them polish their public images to best advantage.

"The dissidents were being offered everything that our wide-open, celebrity-driven society can cook up," says Marshall Strauss, a former DC fundraiser and lobbyist who was one of those Americans. "They were coming out of a closed, authoritarian society, and didn't know what they were experiencing. They developed relationships with patrons who'd offer them more and more concrete advice. And if you observed it from the outside, these people were handling them."

Chai Ling turned to David Phillips, of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, in Washington, who helped her sort through the avalanche of media inquiries and career opportunities in the beginning. Li Lu, who had all of New York to himself, dissident-wise, had many Americans smoothing his transition. Mary Daly, a New York human-rights activist and public-relations specialist, gave him a home for a while, helped him to deal with the press, and raised money from her friends for his first semester at Columbia (scholarships took care of the rest). And he became good friends with Trudie Styler, Sting's wife -- hence the castoffs. Back then, Li didn't even know who Sting was.

Styler took up Li's cause with a fervor, buying the rights to Moving the Mountain, which she and Michael Apted made into an ornate, gauzy, reenactment-glutted documentary. When the New Yorker wrote about his graduation party, it referred to the former student as "a Nelson Mandela figure" for China. Of all the dissidents, Li had risen the highest.

For the first few months in America, Shen Tong and Wu'er Kaixi were a team, and to guide them at first, they had Marshall Strauss. "I developed a relationship with several Chinese," Strauss recalls. "The closest was with Shen Tong, but I also was friendly with Kaixi and others. I was as close as any American, but I didn't have a lock on them."

Strauss says patrons were sometimes possessive about their charges: "Everyone wanted to get to them," and, he adds, to keep others from getting to them -- to "have a lock on them." If the media wanted to speak to Shen Tong, they went to Strauss first. (He is still kicking himself for telling Charlie Rose that Shen was too busy for an appearance, suggesting Li Lu instead. "I thought it was just a local TV talk show," he says.)

During those first few months, Wu'er and Shen made a dizzying number of public appearances and speeches at pro-democracy rallies across the country. Their renown soon reached ludicrous proportions. Less than three months after tanks had rolled into Beijing, the two youths found themselves in a flashy house in the Hollywood hills negotiating a deal with studio executives for a film based on their lives. In October of 1989, rounding out their rise from Beijing to big bucks, they held court at the William Morris agency's New York offices as nine publishers vied for the rights to their joint memoirs.

"It was this incredible stage play," recalls Strauss, "the excitement of these famous Tiananmen leaders holding court, and every 45 minutes another editor comes in!"

Houghton Mifflin won, with a $100,000 advance for Almost a Revolution.

But it was all too much for Wu'er. He had emerged from Tiananmen as the biggest star, but handled the hype machine badly, and, by the end of 1989, his celebrity began to exact a price. Chinese-language newspapers worldwide ran stories about his grand lifestyle: he had expensive taste in suits; he was petulant and arrogant in public, refusing to speak at one Harvard function because the audience had been "disrespectful." Being the star speaker at so many events had gone to his head.

Having reaped the benefits of media adulation, Wu'er did not quite grasp the importance -- and the perishability -- of good press. Wu'er admits that he was also completely out of control at the time. "I don't think anyone could really refuse that temptation," he says. "I was lost."

Part 5 - Money by the envelopes

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