Zhang Boli

Before

Zhang Boli was a writer and graduate student at Peking University and one of the most visible student leaders of the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square — a passionate organizer and orator who helped give the protests their voice. Like nearly all of his generation of intellectuals, he was an atheist; his hope was set entirely on political reform, the awakening of his nation, and the power of the people gathered in the square. He believed they were on the cusp of remaking China. Then, in the early hours of June 4, the tanks and soldiers rolled in, the square was cleared by force, and that hope was crushed in a single night of bloodshed. When the government published its list of the twenty-one most-wanted student leaders, Zhang Boli's name was near the top — number seventeen — and overnight he became a hunted man with a price on his head.

The Turning Point

So began nearly two years on the run. Zhang fled across China and into hiding, much of it in the remote forests and frozen marshlands of the northeast near the Soviet border, sheltering in caves, reed beds, and the huts of strangers who risked everything to hide him. He endured brutal cold, hunger that brought him close to starvation, illness, and the constant, grinding fear of betrayal and capture. Everything that had defined him — his status, his cause, his confidence, his very name — had been stripped away, and he was reduced to a single hunted creature alone in the wilderness. It was there, in that emptiness and silence, with no audience to impress and no agenda left to push, that the proud atheist intellectual began for the first time in his life to cry out to God — not as a theory, but as a drowning man cries for rescue. And God answered. In the wilderness he encountered the living Christ, and the entire direction of his life turned. The student who had sought to save his nation found that he himself had been found.

After

Zhang eventually made a harrowing escape — out of China, through Hong Kong, and to the United States. There he gave his life wholly to the God who had met him, studying theology, earning his degrees, and being ordained a pastor. He has spent the decades since shepherding Chinese congregations and telling his story from countless pulpits and in his memoir Escape from China, bearing witness to how God found a desperate fugitive in the frozen wilderness and gave him a hope and a freedom that no government, no exile, and no manhunt could ever take away.

In Their Words

“I went into the wilderness a hunted man with nothing left, and I came out a child of God with everything that matters.”— Zhang Boli