Zhang Boli - Biography

Biography

Zhang Boli was born in Wangkui County, Heilongjiang Province. He worked as a journalist after graduating from a three-year college in Heilongjiang Province. He attended a short training program at Beijing University in 1989.

Zhang participated and became one of the leaders in the late stage of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 and helped organize the hunger strike that accompanied it. He was number 17 on the Chinese Most Wanted list for the 21 Tiananmen Square Protest leaders.

After escaping from Beijing, Zhang spent two years as a fugitive in China. He once escaped into the Soviet Union, but his request to be sent to a free country as a political refugee seeking asylum was refused. He was allowed to escape back into China. He worked at a small farm in a remote corner of Heilongjiang Province. After a friend found a way for him to escape, he came down south again. After divorcing his wife and briefly reuniting with his daughter, he was smuggled into Hong Kong.

He wrote a book called Escape From China about how he escaped the PRC government. He is currently a pastor in the Washington, D.C. area and leads a church called "Harvest Chinese Christian Church" in Fairfax, Virginia. He married his second wife and has two children from two marriages.