Originally published by Reuters,04 Jun 2010

By Emma Graham-Harrison and Olivier Fabre

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese police arrested a leading figure from China’s 1989 pro-democracy student movement on Friday after he tried to push his way into the Chinese embassy to draw attention to a 21-year separation from his parents.

Wu’er Kaixi, 42, has not been allowed back into China since he fled the June 4, 1989 crackdown on the protest movement, and says Chinese authorities refuse to issue his parents with passports so they cannot arrange a reunion overseas.

“As far as I know, he might be the only one of the students in Tiananmen square who hasn’t seen his parents ever since,” said Yang Jianli, a Boston-based exile and activist who said he spoke to Wu’er Kaixi on Friday morning Japanese time.

“He told me he might try to enter the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo to protest … He hasn’t seen his parents for 21 years.”

Wu’er Kaixi leapt over the security barrier at the embassy and tried to run in before he was caught, footage from Japanese news agency Kyodo showed. The agency said he was arrested by the Japanese metropolitan police on charges of trespassing.

Kyodo also reported that he was denied access to board an Air China flight to Beijing on Thursday despite having a ticket.

Tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square before dawn on June 4, 1989 to crush weeks of student and worker protests. Public memories have faded but the Communist Party, which has never released a death toll, still fears any commemoration could challenge its hold on power.

As a 21 year-old hunger striker, Wu’er Kaixi rebuked then-Premier Li Peng on national television.

After the crackdown, he fled to France and then studied at Harvard University, but came under attack for his extravagant lifestyle in exile. He now works at an investment firm in Taiwan.

He is a Uighur, a Turkic, largely Muslim people from the northwestern region of Xinjiang, and his prominence is unusual for someone of his ethnic background.

Beijing fears separatist and extremist sentiment in the area, concerns that were exacerbated after deadly rioting in the regional capital last year. Uighurs regularly complain of difficulties in securing passports.

Yang said that both Wu’er Kaixi’s high-profile attack on Premier Li and his ethnicity could potentially have contributed to his parents’ problems securing passports.