Wuer Kaixi. 21. A Uighur with wavy black hair, big round eyes, high cheekbones. Shown last week on Chinese television on secret videotape from a Beijing hotel that falsely suggested he was eating when he was on a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. Wanted by the Chinese government. His crime: he was a leader of the prodemocracy movement.
Just a few months ago, Wuer was a handsome college freshman who listened to Beethoven, read classic Chinese novels and thought there was no greater adventure than riding horseback with cossack herdsmen in the cool mountains of his beloved Xinjiang autonomous region.
But then Wuer found a more compelling cause in rallying discontented students to demand changes from the Chinese government. It was Wuer who, though wilting from hunger, sat across from Li Peng and chastised him for arriving late to the meeting accorded the protesters. "He talked with Li Peng as an equal," said a Beijing intellectual. His denim jacket and shaggy hair became a familiar sight in Tiananmen, where the charismatic Wuer barked directives from a bullhorn and bantered with demonstrators and journalists alike. Even after other student leaders voted him off the standing committee organizing the protests, in part for advising his fellow strikers to abandon the square the day after martial law was declared, Wuer remained devoted to the cause. "I deserved to be replaced," he conceded, for believing false information that the army was about to move in. After the army finally did appear two weeks later, Wuer vanished, and only last week's manhunt dispelled rumors that he had been shot to death or had taken his own life.
China's hard-liners have vilified Wuer and other student protesters as counterrevolutionaries. But those who have known Wuer for years say he never sought to overthrow the government and that he hoped one day to join the * Communist Party. During the protests, he told reporters his aim was to "form a nationwide citizens' organization, like the Polish Solidarity," able to deal "openly and directly" with the government. Though sometimes overconfident, even cocky, he had no history of troublemaking. "He's a good student, he's from a good family, he loves the people, and he loves the country," said a close friend. But like others in the protest movement, Wuer possessed a combustible mix of raw courage and naivete. Weeks before the Tiananmen massacre, he told an American reporter, "I knew that we needed an organizer who wasn't afraid to die."
He was born Orkache (pronounced Wu-er-kai-she as transliterated into Chinese) Dawlat in Beijing on Feb. 17, 1968, a native Uighur, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, when an aging Mao Zedong fomented social unrest in the name of class struggle. A family portrait shows Wuer, age 1, holding up a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. Throughout the rigors of the period, his father remained a loyal member of the party who spent years translating the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao from Chinese into Uighur. When thousands of China's intellectuals were forced out of the cities to work as peasants in the countryside, Wuer's father went willingly. The strain and exposure left his legs paralyzed for years afterward, but he neither complained nor criticized the party.