Weeks after the June 4 military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Chinese authorities released a most-wanted list of 21 student leaders, including Wang Dan and Wu'erkaixi. The warrants triggered a nationwide manhunt and a covert rescue operation, later dubbed Operation Yellowbird, that smuggled dozens of dissidents out of mainland China through Hong Kong.
Just nine days after tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds if not thousands of demonstrators, Beijing's Public Security Ministry published photographs and names of 21 student organizers deemed responsible for the unrest. State television broadcast the faces of young activists like Wang Dan, a 20-year-old history student, and Wu'erkaixi, an ethnic Uighur who had become one of the movement's most recognizable faces after publicly confronting Premier Li Peng on live television.
The warrants set off a frantic underground railroad. Hong Kong triad members, foreign diplomats, and sympathetic clergy collaborated in an operation that came to be known as Operation Yellowbird, smuggling wanted students across the border into Hong Kong and onward to exile in the United States, France, and elsewhere. Some escapees hid in fishing boats; others crossed on foot through remote terrain in Guangdong province.
Not everyone escaped. Some student leaders, including Wang Dan, chose to stay and were later captured and imprisoned for years. The manhunt marked the beginning of a long era of surveillance and suppression of the 1989 movement's participants, many of whom remain barred from returning to China more than three decades later.
Key people: Wang Dan, Wu'erkaixi, Li Peng