Profile of Wang Dan - Wang Dan Profile

Wang Dan (王丹) was born February 26, 1969 in Beijing into an academic family. His mother, Wang Lingyun, and father, Wang Xianzeng, were both graduates of Peking University. Wang's father later served as a professor of geology at Peking University, and his mother worked as a museum historian. Every summer, Wang Dan traveled to his mother's ancestral village, Heze, located in the countryside in Shandong Province, where he lived with relatives. His cousin, Wang Lichao, would later tell Time Magazine: "I got into scrapes nearly every week, but Wang Dan would never hit anyone. He used words to fight instead."

Wang graduated from Beijing No. 41 Middle School and enrolled in Peking University in 1987 to study modern history. He quickly became a involved in democracy salons on campus where he brought guest lecturers and led discussions on democratic principles and political reform. Wang began to question Marxism and created the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation, a group that was later outlawed by the government.

In a 2007 interview, Wang Dan told HK Magazine: "The first two years of college were the golden years of my youth. I hung out with friends, and had intellectual discussions about national and political issues."

In his second year at Peking University, former State Council Premier and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack in April 1989. Hu was a liberal reformer in the Party and was forced to resign after student protests erupted in 1986. Students mourning Hu's death used it as a launching pad to push for greater political reform.

A day before Hu's funeral on April 18, 1989, over 100,000 students marched on Tiananmen Square to push for political change. Wang, only 20 years old, lead over a thousand Peking University classmates who had participated in his democracy salons to the protests.

Wang Dan quickly became the most prominent student speaker in the demonstrations, along with fellow students Chai Ling and Wuerkaixi. He would lead a hunger strike, class boycotts and sit-ins.

Wang later told AFP that he would always remember the April 27, 1989 demonstration where over 50,000 students walked from the university district to Tiananmen Square in protest.

"There were banners everywhere. This was the first unauthorized political demonstration in the People's Republic of China... the Chinese people had begun to speak with their own voice," Wang said.

On June 4, 1989, the government instituted martial law in Beijing and began cracking down on demonstrators. Wang was at Peking University when the crackdown happened and avoided the bloodshed. But the government was after him. Wang was at the top of the list of the 21 most wanted students.

Wang later told HK Magazine: "Until the army began firing their guns, I simply couldn’t imagine the government would order a massacre. The officials I talked to had guaranteed that there would be no violent suppression."

While many protesters were able to flee China, Wang hid from police, but was captured and detained a month after the crackdown. Wang was tried and sentenced to four years in jail in 1991 for disseminating counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement.

He was paroled in 1993, five months before the end of his sentence and just before the International Olympic Committee visited Beijing for an inspection tour.

After his release, Wang continued to write essays on democracy for overseas media. His continued political activism led to his re-arrest in 1995 for subversive activities. He was detained for over a year and sentenced to 11 years in jail for plotting to overthrow the government. In 1998, a deal was struck to release Wang on medical parole to the United States, just before President Bill Clinton attended a summit in China. His sentence officially ended in 2007, and a certificate of release was given to Wang's parents.

After his release, Wang continued his studies at Harvard University, where he would get a master's in East Asian history in 2001 and later a PhD in 2008. His PhD thesis was a comparative study of Chinese mainland and Taiwanese politics in the 1950s.

He chairs the Chinese Constitutional Reform Association, and organization he co-founded in 2005, which advocates for constitutional change in China.

In May 30, 2009, days before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Wang told the South China Morning Post, "I've never considered myself the leader of the democracy movement... But I've never given up my ideals just because there are so few people willing to devote themselves to opposition movements."

Wang currently serves as a senior associate member of Oxford University. In September 2009, he plans to be a visiting scholar at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is not allowed to return to China.