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NINGBO, China --
With his nonstop patter and eye for the untapped niche market -- in this case, wedding-cake ornaments for the U.S. -- the 34-year-old Mr. Xin could be any Chinese-American businessman in China trying to clinch a deal. But he isn't. Unknown to the rival plastics manufacturers trooping to his hotel room on a recent visit, Mr. Xin was once famous as an enemy of the state: a student protester who helped lead the 1989 democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square before retreating from rifle-toting soldiers into a dissident's exile in the U.S. 
Now from the New York office of his start-up BchinaB Inc. and on frequent trips back to China, Mr. Xin has embraced a new vocation: budding plastics tycoon, one who can link U.S. buyers with China's fragmented legions of plastics processors. "What happened was all in the past. I'm a full-time, 150% entrepreneur devoted to building my business," says the stocky, talkative Mr. Xin, feet up on a coffee table in the mid-market hotel suite that doubles as his office in the thriving port city of Ningbo. "That's the way I see how to help China." In Mr. Xin's trajectory from political dissident to plastics mogul can be traced the arc of a generation of activists. Over the years and in increasing numbers, members of the Tiananmen generation have traded in their dissident credentials for the world of business back in their homeland. Their transformation shows how much China's economic progress over the past decade has won the loyalties of a generation that once seemed bent on overthrowing the regime. Their return also sheds light on the government's surprising willingness to compromise with former foes as long as they steer clear of politics. Two former members of a U.S. student group outspoken in condemning the protests' brutal suppression are now among China's most celebrated technology pioneers: James Ding and Liu Yadong of AsiaInfo Holdings Inc., China's first Nasdaq-listed technology company. The head of Microsoft Corp.'s research center in China, Yaqin Zhang, traveled to Paris in 1989 to set up a coalition of exiled groups aimed at organizing against the government. Some returnees are cutting their own bargains with a receptive officialdom eager for foreign investment and willing to forget the past. Mr. Xin says he has been approached by security forces, but declines to say more. In an apparent bargain, he sticks mainly to the commercially oriented south and avoids Beijing. Other once-active dissidents are quietly being sounded out by police officials over dinner on visits to Beijing, Shanghai and other cities, says Xiao Qiang of New York's Human Rights in China. "They're saying, 'We would like you to come back. What kinds of conditions can you accept?' " says Mr. Xiao. This rapprochement suggests how unlikely it is that China's educated will be a source of future protest. Anger that economic reforms hadn't improved run-down dormitories and limited job opportunities drove the students' protests in 1989. But in the years since, reforms have benefited this elite group of what is still a mostly poor and rural nation. And the charisma and ambition that made some of them protest leaders have found an outlet in China's freewheeling business environment. "They were the best and brightest of their generation. Thirteen years later, they're still the leaders of their generation," says Li Lu, one of the Tiananmen era's most prominent leaders and a close friend of Mr. Xin who runs investment funds in New York. A small kid from a farming village studying nuclear physics at provincial Lanzhou University, Mr. Xin led fellow students to Beijing to join the demonstrators swelling into Tiananmen Square in May of 1989. He worked 22 hours a day, in part compiling sightings of troop movements around the city. As the crackdown loomed, Mr. Xin impulsively changed his name from Xin Weirong, which means "glory," to Xin Ku, meaning "bitterness," a name by which his movement-era friends still know him. On the heels of the military assault believed to have killed hundreds, Mr. Xin went into weeks of hiding. An underground network, about which little is known today, got him to a boat that -- with bullets whizzing past -- brought him out of China and made him one of the first Tiananmen protesters to reach the West. By then, he was thin, exhausted and uncommunicative, says Jonathan Fine, a founder of Physicians for Human Rights, who met Mr. Xin in Chicago. "He was sort of out to lunch. I think it was post-traumatic stress syndrome," Dr. Fine says of their first meeting. "There was tremendous anger." Looking back, Mr. Xin says that depression lasted four or five years, as he climbed through Yale University, embarked on a concerted assimilation into American life and, with a master of business administration degree, began a career in finance. "Something was missing for me," says Mr. Xin. By his own reckoning, that something was China, and when his chance to return came eight years into exile, it re-energized him. That first tentative look in 1997, at the city of Shenzhen just across the Hong Kong border, amazed him: the teeming shops, the new stock market and the people more prosperous and outwardly free than he imagined. He moved to make up for lost time. He soon founded BchinaB with the aim of becoming the main conduit between U.S. buyers and China's plastics-products makers. If there is a rupture with the world of his youth, Mr. Xin doesn't see it. Instead, he says the venture reflects an idealism still largely intact: He works only with private enterprises that he says will nudge China toward freedom and prosperity. That is why he is focused on Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai that is a center of private enterprise. To date, he has been scouting out prospective manufacturers for a New York client, a company that designs wedding-cake figurines for every conceivable market -- blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, and any combination thereof. There is even a wheelchair-bound figurine for the handicapped. But ultimately, Mr. Xin wants to remake the industry. He has organized 650 plastics processors into a buyers' cooperative and is seeking funding to sell them imported, high-quality resins at a price that would make them competitive with their large state-owned rivals. "That will revolutionize the way things are done here," says Mr. Xin.
Those ambitions find a welcome reception in Ningbo, where local trading officials help him assess arcane import rules over a banquet of warm rice wine and chilled crab. In the convivial atmosphere, he is treated like an insider, yet he keeps an emotional distance. Never mentioned is his past as a Tiananmen protester, which remains for him "the most important event in my life." But he adds: "I don't want to be a dissident. I want to make things happen here."
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