A student leader from the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in China said Monday he would not give up trying to get back to his homeland after 20 years in exile.
Wu'er Kaixi was speaking in Tokyo, where police released him Sunday two days after he was arrested for trying to enter the Chinese embassy during a protest to mark the 21st anniversary of the bloody crackdown.
His goal was to surrender and be sent back to his home country.
Wu'er Kaixi vowed that, after two decades in exile, "my attempt to come home will never be stopped.
"I'm trying to continue to fulfil my promise I have made to the Chinese government and to the world that our attempt will never stop," the activist said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
He also said that this time last year a top-ranking item on search engine Google in China, where the Internet is censored, was the date 'June 4'.
A member of the Uighur ethnic minority, Wu'er Kaixi, now 42, was number two on the government's "most-wanted" list of student protesters following the military crackdown, which left hundreds, possibly thousands, dead.
He was seen as a hardline student leader and took part in a hunger strike in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, resulting in his hospitalisation.
After the protests he spent time in the United States and then went to live in Taiwan. On June 4 last year, he was deported to Taiwan after trying unsuccessfully to enter Macau to turn himself in to the Chinese government.
He said that he wanted to return to China, telling the press conference: "A person with a warrant on his head cannot get himself surrendered to the regime. How absurd is that?"
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