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Wu’er Kaixi (吾爾開希, 58) is one of the leading student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement. Born in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, he was a student at Beijing Normal University and served as a central figure in the leadership of the Tiananmen Square protests. He became a symbolic figure of the student movement that demanded political reform, press freedom, and an end to corruption under the Chinese Communist Party’s one-party system.
In May 1989, he drew nationwide attention after a public meeting with then–Premier Li Peng (李鵬) at the Great Hall of the People. While on a hunger strike, he appeared in a hospital gown and openly criticized China’s leadership. The image was circulated worldwide by foreign media. He later came to be known, alongside Wang Dan (王丹) and Chai Ling (柴玲), as one of the faces of the Tiananmen generation.
But in June of that year the government moved to suppress the protests by force, and the situation changed rapidly. Wu’er Kaixi was placed on a wanted list by public security, and he escaped through secret routes—known as Operation Yellowbird—via Hong Kong to France. He eventually settled in Taiwan and has continued his pro-democracy activism. He currently chairs the Taiwan Association for Democracy in China and continues to raise international awareness about China’s human rights issues and the need for democratization.
He has attempted to return to China several times, but each effort failed. In 2010 he entered the Chinese embassy in Tokyo and demanded to be sent back to China; Japanese police detained him. At the time he publicly declared his wish to return, saying, “Give me the right to return home.”
At the press conference, he again spoke about the anguish of exile. “Exile is a constant mental and spiritual torture,” he said, adding that his father had died but he was unable to enter China to say a final goodbye. “Thirty-seven years have passed, but my desire to return home has never changed,” he said, stressing that China’s democratization remains an unfinished task.
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