Taking A Stand — page 2

If Li came knocking at your door, you might mistake him for an encyclopedia salesman. He's just flown three hours from Beijing to the balmy Pearl River Delta, and he's sweating. His frumpy tweed jacket is too hot and his suitcase of how-to election books is too heavy. A typical boomtown, Panyu is a mess of construction sites and makeshift factories, and home to a million migrant workers—part of the roughly 120 million who have moved to cities looking for employment since the early 1990s. Many labor in dangerous factories for bosses who occasionally vanish with months of unpaid wages, yet the workers are barred from forming their own unions. Li Fan sees in their suffering a latent political force. If they begin organizing, they might need elections to choose their leaders. That's why he's here.

On this day in early February, Li visits the privately run Migrant Workers Cultural Development Center, which provides legal counseling. It looks like a typical underfunded NGO, with college-age volunteers tapping at cheap computers. Li meets with the group's young boss, Zeng Feiyang, near a handwritten slogan on the wall urging workers to "Unite in Mutual Assistance." After handing over some books, Li discusses Zeng's operations and the political constraints. Li asks if Zeng can urge workers to settle their problems collectively. No, Zeng says, because that would be too sensitive, but he can point them to others facing the same problems. Can Zeng organize lectures on protecting their rights? Yes, he holds several each week and provides a lawyer to represent workers for free. Can Zeng issue membership cards? He's not sure: that smacks of illegal organizing. "Nobody knows what's possible these days," Li advises him. "Whatever you can do, that's what's possible."

Hours later, Li's enthusiasm has not waned. "If we can't have independent unions," he says to Zeng, "we can have independent advocates." Zeng agrees, and says he's considered running for his city's People's Congress—all part of a careful strategy to work within the limits of China's confining political system. Together the pair start mapping out a campaign that can't even start until the next round of People's Congress elections in 2008. In the meantime, Li suggests cooperating in other areas. "Helping migrants, helping AIDS victims and pursuing elections are all part of the same big issue—and that's promoting democracy," he says. The pact is made. "Democracy has a long time frame," Zeng says, "and I'm only 29."

	Ten years ago, if I'd done this work, I'd have been arrested as a counterrevolutionary. —LI FAN,  Chinese democracy activist

Li is a good bit older. He was born in 1949, the year the People's Republic was founded, and the Communist Party served his family well. His father, a senior Party official, was a confidante of China's legendary Premier Zhou Enlai. Li attended the same school as Mao Zedong's daughter, and during years of famine he would enjoy out-of-season oranges that his father carried home from meetings. When Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Li helped form a Red Guard unit and teamed up with an unlikely comrade to help lead it: Wei Jingsheng, who would later become China's most famous pro-democracy dissident. Back then, though, Wei fashioned himself as a shock-troop leader while Li, the strategist, "stayed more in the background," Wei recalls.

The scars of the Cultural Revolution convinced Wei that China needed radical change. During the Democracy Wall movement that started in 1978, he wrote a seminal essay demanding the Party expand its "four modernizations" to include a fifth: democracy. Wei's escalating audacity cost him nearly 18 years in prison. His exile since his release in 1997, says Li, means Wei "lost his chance to reshape China's future." Li traveled a different road. He studied history at a Beijing university, became a founding member of what would become an incubator for liberal thinkers, the Political Science Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and spent five years studying politics at Ohio State University. In late 1988, aides to former Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, who was pressing for political reform, urged Li to return. He came back in March of 1989 and "could smell in the air" that a political conflict loomed. But Li kept his distance, and when the shooting began on June 4, "it confirmed for me that radical action would never succeed."

As the trauma of Tiananmen Square wore off and scholars in the mainland were allowed to think again, Li formed his World and China Institute in 1993. He hosted conferences on village elections and wrote a book called A Silent Revolution about the rise of Chinese interest groups. No Chinese publisher would touch it. Then, in 1998, he heard of officials in Sichuan province in China's far west who wanted to host a direct election for township magistrate. (By law, such leaders must be elected by local congresses, which generally approve a single, Party-nominated candidate.) Li spent a month in the provincial town of Buyun overseeing the landmark election, then leaked the results to the country's most liberal newspaper, Southern Weekend. That sparked an intense debate inside the Communist Party on whether to let the election stand. It did. In the Party's more progressive circles, Li became an overnight sensation.

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