‘I want to see my parents. I’ll take any deal’: the Tiananmen Square leader desperate to return to China

Anyone in China who remembers the Tiananmen Square protests will remember Wu’er Kaixi. As thousands of students began a hunger strike in May 1989, premier Li Peng held live, televised talks with the protest leaders. Wu’er Kaixi, then 21, turned up to the talks in hospital pyjamas, oxygen bag in tow, and berated the elderly communist leaders. It was an electrifying moment. After the CCP’s bloody crackdown, he found himself second on the party’s most-wanted list. He fled China and eventually ended up in Taiwan.

We meet in a Taipei jazz bar, which he tells me is his ex-girlfriend’s favourite spot.  Kaixi, as he asks me to call him, talks about his survivor’s guilt. ‘I was a leader of a movement where many of the students were killed,’ he says. ‘I’m the captain who didn’t die with the sinking ship.’ The 55-year-old has spent most of his life in exile. He has never stopped campaigning against the CCP, these days frequenting Taiwanese TV as a pundit and running the Taiwan Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, a hawkish caucus that scrutinises human rights abuses within China. There are still flashes of the idealistic 21-year-old who dared interrupt one of China’s most powerful men. He bashes the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for being too passive, criticises the US for historically acting like ‘bouncers’ and ‘cheerleaders’ for China, and dubs Henry Kissinger ‘the most favourite guest of China’ (not a compliment).

Yet he’s desperate to go back to China and face the authorities, even if it leads to imprisonment. He has tried – and failed – four times; every time the Chinese government has refused to let him back in.

Overseas dissidents are ‘too weak’, he tells me.