Eight years ago, Li Lu, a young physics and economics scholar from Nanking University, stood on the front lines of protest against China's dictatorship. As deputy commander of the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, he faced tanks, tear gas, and a two-month manhunt that forced him to flee to the United States.

Today Li Lu stands on the front lines of global finance. As a young deal maker in the Los Angeles office of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), Li, 31, faces the pressures of life in the high-stakes, 24-hour-a-day world of investment banking.

Li's transformation from democratic activist to global capitalist is jarring -- and illuminating. "The most important legacy of Tiananmen is a new generation of Chinese people who have embraced a spirit of independence and are dedicated to building a free and democratic society," he says.

The Tiananmen generation also understands that business, not politics, is the force driving social change: "Politically, China suppresses its people," he says. "But because the government allows some freedom in economic matters, business has become the ultimate expression of individuality."

That's certainly true for Li Lu. He had a childhood of unimaginable hardship. Communist authorities sent his parents to a reeducation camp during the Cultural Revolution, when Li was just six months old. His grandfather, a prominent intellectual, was already in jail. So Li moved between orphanages and foster homes until he was sent to live with a family in a coal-mining region.

In 1976, when he was just 10, his entire foster family was killed in a massive earthquake. Li was reunited with his parents. A decade or so later, he embraced political activism, landed on China's Most Wanted list, and fled for his life.

Li arrived in New York City unable to speak a word of English. But he became a darling of the celebrity-as-activist crowd, and his new high-profile friends (especially Trudie Styler, Sting's wife) took up Li's cause and got him on his feet. He entered Columbia University, published a memoir that was made into a movie, and delivered lectures across the country.

In 1996, six years after he enrolled, Li became the first student in Columbia's history to earn degrees from the undergraduate college, the law school, and the business school simultaneously. To celebrate this accomplishment, media mogul John Kluge threw Li a graduation bash. Wall Street firms such as Lazard Freres and DLJ pitched him job offers.

What drives Li Lu? "Everybody has the potential to become a great leader, a great scientist, a great professor, a great human being," he says. "The biggest crime of the Chinese political system is that it restricts that potential. When I got an opportunity to try mine out, I chose to do what everyone told me was impossible."

Li also has seemingly impossible goals for his homeland. "My ultimate goal," he says, "is to see China develop the same standards of freedom as America." But how does China get there from here? And what is the role of business as a force for change?

On these issues, Li argues from his own experiences. For example, he asserts that the most important force for change is not top-down pressure from outside the country. It's bottom-up pressure from young people whose lives were transformed by the June 4, 1989 massacre.