Wu Renhua

Wu Renhua, aka Yenhua Wu (; born September 12, 1956) is a Chinese scholar and participant in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He has published three books about the crackdown: The Bloody Clearing of Tiananmen Square in 2007, The Martial Law Troops of June Fourth in 2009, and The Full Record of the Tiananmen Movement (六四事件全程实录) in 2014. Wu now lives in California in the United States.

Early life Wu was born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China. After graduating from high school in 1974, Wu took part in the Down to the Countryside Movement and became an elementary and middle school teacher. From 1976 to 1978, Wu was a cadre in the People's Armed Police border defence force in Wenzhou. In 1978, Wu attended the ancient Chinese classical philology program in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature in Peking University. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1982. After his graduation, Wu worked as an editor at Zhonghua Press for five months. He was one of the organizers of the first protest, and was in charge of the hunger strike petition in Xinhua Gate during the hunger strike period on May 13, 1989. He later on received the message that Zhao Ziyang had already been deposed and martial law was imminent in Beijing. Then he immediately dispatched a trusted student leader to the Square with this information.

Exile Right after the events of June 1989, the Chinese government soon created a blacklist to prohibit political dissidents from entering mainland China. The blacklist consists of 49 dissidents in total; Wu was on the list. In March 1990, Wu swam 4 hours from Zhuhai to Macau, then arrived Hong Kong via the Operation Yellowbird. After Wu arrived in Hong Kong in 1990, he received support from two journalists, Ching Cheong and Liu Ruishao, in Hong Kong, and started to collect documents for his research on June Fourth. In addition, he revealed a list of approximately two thousand members of martial law troops who took part in the event. He wrote that even if they are not responsible for the bloodshed, they are still witnesses, and it is their responsibility and duty to speak out on what they did and what they saw. The purpose for his trip was not related to politics; he wanted to visit his mother and relatives in China. Wu explained that his successful entry into China was because he held a U.S. passport, and if the Chinese government did not allow him entry, they might get into diplomatic trouble. He also emphasized that his entry into China does not mean that the PRC government's policies toward the Tiananmen protests of 1989 have changed in any way, and is unrelated to the changing of the CCP leadership, either.