Chinese dissident: "don't be fooled".

• Author: Handal, Nathalie
• Position: Wu'er Kaixi - Interview

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DURING THE TIANANMEN Square uprising in 1989, a student on a hunger strike and dressed in his hospital gown reproached Chinese Premier Li Peng. That student was Wu'er Kaixi, then second on Beijing's most wanted list. As China approaches the twenty-fifth anniversary of the uprising and the massacre, I caught up with Kaixi in exile to get his reflections.

Forced to flee China during the crackdown, he went to Hong Kong and started the Federation for a Democratic China. Then he spent a year in France before briefly attending Harvard University. Eventually, in the mid-nineties, he settled in Taiwan, where he became a well-known radio commentator, and later an investment banker. He has made several failed attempts to go back to China. Despite the setbacks, he holds on to his dream of returning.

"Living in exile is a spiritual torture," he says, "even if it means living in New York City, Paris, and Taipei, one of the greatest cities I believe there to be. Being unable to go back to your country, where I believe I have every right to go, makes me angry all the time. But I have no regrets."

Looking back on the events that led to Tiananmen Square, Kaixi says leaders of the student movement never expected the Chinese government to order the military to open tire on the protesters, killing hundreds and hundreds and wounding thousands. "I will carry survivor's guilt with me for the rest of my life," Kaixi says.

"I was a twenty-one-year-old student thrown into one of the most important historical events of the last century," he says. "We take strong pride in our movement. Hundreds and thousands of university students took to the streets of Beijing and 200 other cities in China. We were all in our twenties, and now we are all in our forties or fifties. We were college educated at a time when the college entrance rate was low. We were the elite. Our generation is significant."

He says the student movement delegitimized the Communist Party, which responded not only with repression but also with economic carrots. "What the student movement contributed to Chinese liberalization is that the people no longer believe in the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party," he says. "So in order for them to stay in power and make the people cooperate with them, they did two things. The first was strengthening their power by suppression and by instilling fear, which wasn't hard to do after the massacre. The second was they struck a deal with the...