Portrait of a "Hooligan"

By TED GUP

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.

A precocious child who read insatiably, Wuer often visited his grandparents in Xinjiang, near the Soviet border, to learn Uighur. But he spent most of his boyhood and school years in Beijing in an apartment adorned by a portrait of Mao put there by his father.

In 1984 the family moved to Urumqi in Xinjiang. On Wuer's bedroom wall hung a portrait of the ancient poet Qu Yuan. Wuer began to write poetry, and took part in school affairs. He helped edit the school newspaper, an experience friends believe developed his interest in freedom of the press. In the summers he went on school field trips into the mountains to stay with the cossack herdsmen. That too left an impression. "He could tell the difference between the life of the ordinary people and the life of the leaders, and he got ideas from these people," said a friend. In 1988 he entered Beijing Normal University. He told friends he wanted to study Chinese literature but felt compelled to pursue an education degree because the Uighurs were in dire need of teachers.

Last January his ideas seemed to flower into activism. He wrote a friend that inflation was "robbing the country," and he worried about its impact on workers. His political views grew out of his own experiences, not Western influence; he never went abroad, but his voracious reading exposed him to all sorts of modern concepts, Chinese and foreign. "He believed," said a friend, "the Chinese expression that the leaders should serve the people."

During the pro-democracy demonstrations, Wuer headed the banned independent union of students, where his sophisticated ideas and brash irreverence won him considerable celebrity. But it was less easy for those who knew him well to think of him on a hunger strike. Since childhood he had suffered acute stomach trouble, and only a few days into the fast he collapsed and was carried to the hospital. His mother crossed the country from Xinjiang to plead with him not to resume his fast. He persisted.

Said a friend: "He fears nothing; he was always like that." But now, with his face on wanted posters across the country, Wuer Kaixi has all China to fear.