The Radical, Lonely, Suddenly Shocking Life of Wang Juntao

A few days a week, Wang Juntao, a primary organizer of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and one of the world's most prominent Chinese dissidents, travels from his home in New Jersey to his office in Flushing. 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 of China. For younger Chinese activists, the Tiananmen generation is no longer the vanguard. If there's no evidence that Zhang was a trained assassin, the U.S. government's case that Wang Shujun is a Chinese operative is richly documented. In 2020, the Justice Department charged a New York police officer with gathering intelligence on the city's Tibetan community for the Chinese government. In October, federal prosecutors accused a father and daughter living in Queens and on Long Island of participating in "Operation Fox Hunt" - a covert Chinese campaign to harass dissidents and other Chinese nationals and coerce them into returning to the mainland.