Word: wuer
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...