Li Lu was one of the student leaders in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 which were broken up when tanks opened fire on pro-democracy protesters. Since then, he has lived a life in exile, studied hard and achieved meteoric success in business.
Li's grandfather, a distinguished scholar and fan of democratic thinker John Dewey, was a prominent critic of Mao, for which he was jailed during the 1949 revolution. His grandmother, a pioneer educator in the 1930s, thrust books into his lap.
When Li was just a baby, his parents were sent to labor camps for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. He passed through a dozen foster homes until he was deposited in a state orphanage, then adopted. His bad fortune continued when his entire adoptive family fell victim to an earthquake in 1976, which hit the coal-mining town of Tangshan. The 10-year-old Li was left alone again until he was reunited with his natural parents during the mid-1980s.
Inspired by his courageous ancestors, Li entered Nanjing University as a student of physics and economics. He was then quickly swept up by the student democracy movement and with his girlfriend traveled 1,000 miles by train to attend the demonstrations in Beijing that changed his life forever.
As the 23-year-old deputy commander to Chai Ling, Li led the hunger strike that turned into the events of Tiananmen Square. When the tanks rolled in on June 4, he was advised to flee. He narrowly escaped to Hong Kong after a two-month manhunt by the Chinese authorities. From there, he made his way to France and then to the United States.
During his first six months in the West, Li stayed with graduate students at Columbia University, acclimatizing to a wholly different world. He began attending Columbia, enrolling in three different degree programs at the undergraduate college, the law school and the business school simultaneously. He became the first student at Columbia University to receive three separate degrees in a single day in 1996. In the meantime, he developed a fascination for the financial market.
After graduation, he worked as an investment banker and embraced capitalism. His mantra became: "free man, free market". Now he is known as the founder of Himalaya Capital Partners, a $20-million hedge fund in Manhattan. He has appeared on the covers of various business magazines.
Li's status as a celebrity dissident has opened doors for him. He has been able to galvanize an elite group to invest in his hedge fund, with a client roster including Sting and Robert Bernstein - founding chairman of Human Rights Watch and former chief executive of Random House - and his son Tom Bernstein, who helped Li gain asylum as the board president of the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights.
Li often invests in stocks he believes are undervalued. "It's what I'm all about," he says. "It's revolutionary. It's about trusting yourself. It's about challenging the conventional wisdom. That's what we did in Tiananmen."
Critics, especially in the Chinese dissident community, find his current preoccupation with capitalism at odds with his past life of political activism. But Li responds, "I have separated my profession and the cause. My profession is to make a living and to excel; democracy in China is my cause." Li continues to campaign for human rights in China. He is spokesperson for the International Affairs Committee of the Alliance for a Democratic China and a member of the Reebok Human Rights Award board of advisors.
 |
| Li Lu Photo: CBS |
