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Within hours of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989, the Beijing government launched the largest manhunt in the history of the People's Republic. Citizens were called on to assist the army and police in rounding up the 21 "masterminds" of the so-called "counter-revolutionary upheaval," and "Most Wanted" posters were splashed on street corners. Authorities boasted that the criminals would find nowhere to hide. At first, the pursuit of the student leaders seemed a surreal exercise in totalitarian theater, a face-saving exercise by the party elders who had ordered troops to crush the democracy movement. But it was soon clear that this was deadly serious, as Zhang Boli reports in Escape from China, his harrowing account of two years as a fugitive from communist justice.

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By mid-July, Zhang, a 26-year-old grad student at Beida University who had helped organize the hunger strikes on the square, was one of the last activists at-large. He was being sheltered by friends and relatives in his native Heilongjiang province. But the Public Security Bureau was determined to smoke out the remaining rebels, and Zhang's arrest was made a top priority. He hid in a cellar beneath an uncle's home, then fled for the Soviet border. Later, he heard that a furious official had given a tacit shoot-to-kill order to be rid of him. Zhang dubs those days "the red terror," and claims that across China house-to-house searches, arbitrary detainments and death sentences for non-political crimes were employed by a government that "felt the need to make itself feared."

Zhang braved a Siberian winter to cross the frozen Heilongjiang River and seek refuge in the Soviet Union, nearly dying of exposure. His experience with the KGB, which denied the fugitive entry into their crumbling empire but allowed him to sneak back into China undetected, is a plot twist worthy of a thriller. Much of Escape from China reads like a novel, with the author as the resourceful hero whose struggle epitomizes the fate of the individual under totalitarianism. That Zhang has come to see his journey in religious terms—he was born again in the snows of Siberia, and is now a pastor in Los Angeles—is a passage taken by many of the Tiananmen Generation.

Before he finally slipped into freedom via Hong Kong, Zhang survived for almost a year disguised as "Old Fourth Wang," a peasant farmer and fisherman in a remote border area. There, he planted rice, fished carp, hunted water deer and encountered a nation where lives remain rooted in nature and clan and authentic interactions between human beings. People knew his true identity, and didn't care. Zhang, in turn, came to admire his "kind and generous neighbors." The most remarkable passages in this memoir are those that explore this "unsanctioned" China. Part of the tragedy for Zhang and fellow exiles from his generation is that they can no longer hope to connect with this unofficial country. Nor can they escape their harsh memories of the official China. Exile could hardly be more bitter.

• Charles Foran
• Books: Escape from China tracks the flight of a Tiananmen Square protester