CHINA Exiles hope for a new system

The '89 protest leaders are still threatened with arrest.
BEIJING (AP) -- Fifteen years after the bloodshed at Tiananmen Square, exiled student leaders of China's 1989 pro-democracy protests are settled abroad as academics and entrepreneurs. But they nurture one wish above all -- to come home to a new system.
"Living in exile, we have to keep our faith that there will be democracy some day," said Wu'er Kaixi, who gained fame as a pajama-clad hunger-striker who harangued then-Premier Li Peng and now is a political commentator in Taiwan.
Though the protest leaders have built new lives and Chinese society has changed drastically since 1989, communist leaders are still intensely sensitive about the protests that drew thousands to vast Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing to demand a more open system and an end to corruption.
The government is trying to prevent any commemoration of the 15th anniversary Friday of the military attack on the demonstrators that killed hundreds and perhaps thousands. Activists and relatives of the dead have been detained or ordered out of the Chinese capital.
Labeled as traitors
Now in their 30s, protest leaders who escaped after the crackdown are still labeled traitors and threatened with arrest. Others served prison terms and left China to start over.
Wang Dan, a principal strategist of the protests, spent seven years in prison. Now 35, he is working toward a doctorate at Harvard University with a thesis on Chinese politics and history and the democratic movement in Taiwan, the self-ruled island that had one-party rule in 1989 but is now a thriving ethnic Chinese democracy.
Chai Ling, a student leader known for her impassioned speeches, runs a software firm in the United States. Fellow demonstrator Li Lu heads an American investment company.
Since 1989, the government has carried out changes demanded by the protesters. It scrapped rules that dictated where Chinese could live or work and even whom they could marry. Economic growth has given millions new power over their lives, while Beijing is cracking down on rampant corruption that it once denied existed. Beijing is experimenting with what it calls "village democracy," with nonpartisan local elections that let tens of millions of Chinese pick officials for low-level posts. President Hu Jintao, who took power last year, has called for more "socialist democracy."