CHAI LING, commander in chief of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters: Chai, a graduate student at Beijing Normal University in 1989, first became involved with the democracy protests because of her then-husband and fellow student leader Feng Congde. As Chinese officials ignored the students’ demands, she advocated a student hunger strike. While few were on board at first, she gave a rousing speech on the Peking University campus that encouraged 220 students to join her in the strike. 

Later she became the commander in chief of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters, where she was in charge of supplying food, shelter, water, sanitation, and medical care to the tens of thousands of people in the square. Early on June 4, she and the other leaders linked arms and led the demonstrators to retreat.

As two of the government’s 21 most-wanted, Chai and Feng escaped by train to Wuhan, where she recorded a statement describing the massacre at Tiananmen. The message was later widely broadcast by Voice of America. A network of devout Buddhists helped the couple hide from authorities for 10 months, and they eventually reached Hong Kong after being smuggled in a cargo box aboard a boat. 

Chai and Feng escaped to France, yet their marriage fell apart as Feng left her for other women. Chai recalls in her autobiography, A Heart for Freedom, that she was filled with rage toward the Chinese government, sorrow from being separated from her homeland and abandoned by her husband, and guilt for surviving the massacre. She attended graduate school at Princeton but afterward found that finance companies wouldn’t hire her due to fears it would hurt their access to the Chinese market. She had to change her name and promise to halt her democracy activism in order to get a job.

She married Bain & Company partner Robert Maginn and started her own tech company, Jenzabar, which provides universities with learning management systems. In 2009, she met Reggie Littlejohn, a Christian who started Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an NGO that works to end forced abortions in China. Littlejohn gave Chai a copy of The Heavenly Man by Paul Hattaway and Brother Yun, the testimony of a Chinese evangelist, and the book impacted her deeply. Through conversations with Littlejohn, Chai professed faith in Christ.

She was able to forgive those who wronged her, find freedom from survivor’s guilt, and finally discover an answer to the question of why the massacre happened: “The Tiananmen event was a milestone in God’s redemptive plan for China,” she wrote in her autobiography. “He allowed evil to happen—the massacre—to kill our belief in the Communist system.” Chai went on to create All Girls Allowed, a Christian ministry also focused on helping Chinese mothers who are forced to abort their babies.

ZHANG BOLI, deputy of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters: Zhang was a journalist before attending Peking University for a writer’s training program in 1989. During the protests, he founded the News Herald, the first nongovernmental newspaper in 40 years. The night before the crackdown, he announced the creation of Tiananmen Democracy University.

After the massacre, he escaped north to his home province of Heilongjiang, while his wife and young daughter stayed behind. Zhang was No. 17 on the most-wanted list and hid in the homes of relatives and close friends—some of whom were high-level cadres. While staying at the home of a childhood friend’s relative, his illiterate host asked him to read her a copy of the book of John, and he was moved reading about Jesus.

Zhang decided to escape across the border to the Soviet Union. Yet after crossing into the Soviet frontiers, he became caught in a heavy snowstorm and wolves began to circle. For warmth, he jumped into a bale of hay inside a shed. Certain of death, he started to pray, promising that if God saved him, he would give his life to Jesus.

The next morning Russian peasants found him, even though they only came to the frontier region once a month. They sent him to the KGB, which interrogated him, held him for a month, and then quietly dropped him off back at the Chinese border.

For the next year and a half, he lived in a small hut in the secluded woods by the Heilongjiang River, where he hunted, tended a field, and had minimal contact with friends in the area. In 1991, a friend and a sympathetic policewoman helped him escape to Hong Kong, where he found out from a news article that his wife had divorced him.

Zhang was granted asylum in the United States, yet doctors soon diagnosed him with severe kidney cancer. During this time, his church friends often came to visit him and he was baptized. After recovering, he attended seminary and is now the pastor of Harvest Chinese Christian Church, which has locations in Virginia, California, New York, Philadelphia, and Singapore.

“Many student leaders professed faith in Christ because we went through great hardship,” Zhang said. “Our desire to shape the future of China was crushed and we realized there was a limit to what we could do. … After believing in God, we finally found the right path to take, rather than leaning on our own understanding.”

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Brother Yun’s name and to note Paul Hattaway as the co-author of The Heavenly Man.

Purdue sociology professor Fenggang Yang: Yang was studying in the United States when he heard about the Tiananmen Square massacre. As a Marxist, he began to fear the consequences of atheism: If there is no God, what will stop people from killing each other? Through prayer and conversations with Christian friends, he professed faith in Christ. Today he is a leading expert on Christianity in China.

Bob Fu: Fu led students from his university in Shandong province to Tiananmen Square to protest. Afterward, police investigated him and forced him to write confessions. In his misery, a classmate handed him a biography of a Christian pastor, which led him to accept Christ as his Savior. Today he is the founder of China Aid, an organization that helps persecuted Christians.