THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL

TUESDAY, April 28, 1998

For a Dissident, Too Much Fame and Freedom

By EDWARD A. GARGAN

Wang Dan, eight days out of a Chinese prison; propped his elbows on the white linen tablecloth yesterday and poured over the menu at Tapika, an airy West Side restaurant.

"I'm waiting for 15 minutes of fame to be over," Mr. Wang said in his gravelly, Beijing-accented voice. "I want to adjust to life in the U.S. I want to look at myself from a normal perspective, not as a political star. I'll concentrate on my studies now."

Fame has shadowed Mr. Wang since 1989, when he became a leader of the largest political protest in the history of the People's Republic. Just weeks after the Chinese Army stormed onto Tiananmen Square killing hundreds of people, Mr. Wang was hunted down and imprisoned.

Since that day in July 1989, he has spent all but two of those years shuttling from detention centers to house arrest and, most recently, to a prison camp for 3,000 inmates in northern Liaoning Province where he was supposed to spend 11 years.

But more temperate relations between Washington and Beijing, a new confidence among China's leaders and an economy that is among the world's largest, has made it possible for former student radicals like Mr. ,Wang to be exiled to the United States with scarcely a ripple on the sea of Chinese society.

And so, eight days ago, Mr. Wang was dumped into a car and driven for 10 hours from his prison to Beijing's airport where he was handed over to an American embassy official and flown to Detroit, the only American city served non-stop from Beijing, and to a life in exile.

Amid the banter around him, Mr. Wang oscillated between delight over his sudden freedom - "too many choices in America," he said, "it gives me a headache" - and voluble worries about his family.

"My family came to visit me once a month," he said. "My parents are typical examples of parents who suffered while their children were in prison, even though my conditions in prison were probably better than other political prisoners."

Both Mr. Wang's father, a retired geology professor at Beijing University, and his mother, who worked at the Museum of Revolutionary History on Tiananmen Square, never flinched in their support for their son, despite constant harassment.

"Wherever my mother went," he said, "she was tailed by the police. My mother's hair has gone completely white. When I went in 1989, she had black hair. I don't think they could have lasted 10 years more. For them, this scenario is better than being in prison."

Mr. Wang said that he hoped his parents could visit him, but Carol Bogart of Human Rights Watch said that the American Embassy in Beijing has been extremely stingy about issuing visas to the families of dissidents exiled in this country.

"It's not human to exile people," Mr. Wang said. "I wanted to stay in China. My exile in America shows that there's not a real effort to improve human rights in China."

Although life was difficult in prison - there was meat only once a week and showers once a month Mr. Wang was quick to say that he was never mistreated. "I was probably given the best treatment of any political prisoners," he said.

"I think for China it's a matter of image. They wanted to use me to, show we were being treated well. China knows it cannot do without other parts of the world. They know China is not isolated. The bottom line is the economic stability and political image of the regime."

While in Liaoning, in the county of Jinzhou, Mr. Wang said he was allowed to read virtually anything he wanted. "I read Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civiliations'" he said, "and 'The Coming Conflict With China,' " a harsh assessment of relations between Washington and Beijing. "I also read Michel Foucault,' the French scholar who wrote daringly about the nature of power." learned that knowledge is power,' Mr. Wang said, "and I was impressed by his sense of responsibility as an intellectual, by his need to participate in public affairs."

This respect for the role of the intellectual in society has deep root in both classical and contemporary Chinese history. In 1989, when Wang Dan was 20, he and other young students at Beijing University were moved by a heady mixture of youthful certitude and righteousness that fueled months of demonstrations for democratic freedom and against bureaucratic corruption that led to the massacre on Tiananmen Square.

Now, Mr. Wang said, he repeatedly reflects on those days and the decisions he and other student leaders made.

"We didn't really think about what the response to the protests on Tiananmen would be," he explained. "Tiananmen was the result of idealism. It was the peak of Chinese idealism. Our thinking now is how could we have done it better, including how we made our political demands, and the way we dealt with the Government, the timing of the 'demonstrations. If we were more mature, we could have done things differently. But history is not made up of ifs."

Mr. Wang said he now intends to concentrate on finishing his education, both to fulfill his parents' expectations and to continue to take part in the tradition of Chinese intellectual dissidence.

"I have this dream to be the president of Beijing University," he said. I want to get a Ph.D. from Harvard and go back to Beida," referring to the colloquial name by which the country's pre-eminent university is known.

"This is my first time eating western food in New York," said Mr. Wang. "America," he laughed, "is a very anything goes' country."

"Remember," he said as he stood up to leave, "I need your vote to be president of Beida."