Beijing (CNN) -- After walking several blocks through New York's busy streets recently, I finally found Wang Juntao in the middle of Times Square, where the exiled Chinese dissident was holding a sit-down protest. Wearing a grey suit and yellow tie, Wang sits in a makeshift cage to dramatize the imprisonment of Wang Bingzhang, a fellow pro-democracy activist who has been imprisoned in China for the past 11 years. Occasionally, tourists come by to read the posters on display, which explain the plight of Wang in English and Chinese, before they walk away. Close by, a bank of giant video screens flash advertisements for a range of consumer products and, by coincidence, for Xinhua, China's state-controlled news agency.
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Wang Juntao, Bo Xilai, Li Keqiang were all students at Peking University in the 1970s
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Wang is now an exiled dissident, Bo is in prison, while Li is China's premier
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Peking University, known in Chinese as Beida, founded as training ground for China's intellectuals
In 1919, Beida students led street demonstrations in @placeholder, known then as Peking, condemning Confucian traditions and values, as well as the foreign domination of their country.