THE RADICAL, LONELY, SUDDENLY SHOCKING LIFE OF WANG JUNTAO

After half a century of resisting the Chinese Communist Party, a dissident confronts murder and espionage in Flushing.

- CHRISTOPHER BEAM

A FEW DAYS A WEEK, Wang Juntao, a primary organizer of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and one of the world’s most renowned Chinese dissidents, travels from his home in New Jersey to his office in Flushing. He drives to the train station with the cheapest parking, then takes the path to the LIRR to Main Street, emerging to the whiff of fish and cigarettes and the roar of planes making their final approach to La Guardia. Skirting a stretch of street vendors and Falun Gong practitioners, Juntao cuts up 41st Avenue toward the weather-beaten headquarters of the Democratic Party of China, the organization he has led for more than a decade, dedicated to the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party.

New York has the greatest number of exiled Chinese activists in the world, and Flushing is the effective headquarters of the minyun—the movement for democracy in the People’s Republic. The cause, which counted thousands of adherents in the period after Tiananmen, has dwindled in recent years to include perhaps a few hundred active dissidents. Juntao’s office is not a glamorous space. Located above a noodle shop and an internet café, it has boxes piled in the entryway, and the bathroom doubles as storage for the old-school tools of protest: megaphones, signs, paintbrushes.

Juntao usually sits in a folding chair at the head of a long table that’s covered in fraying plastic. At 64, he is impish and disarming with a prominent comb-over and an even more prominent paunch. When I went to see him in Flushing recently, he pulled back a curtain to reveal shelves of wine and liquor and offered me a cup of red. “I’m a professional revolutionary,” he said in a heavy Beijing accent. “You have to drink, you have to fight, you have to be tough.”