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The ones who made it out, by name.

1990–2012 · Case 9 of 15

This case rests on named people rather than aggregate numbers, because the numbers for political asylum are harder to verify than the individual stories are.

Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist whose writing helped shape the 1989 protest movement, took refuge inside the US Embassy in Beijing after the crackdown and remained there for thirteen months before China allowed him to leave in June 1990. He went on to teach at the University of Arizona for the rest of his career.

Wei Jingsheng spent most of two decades in Chinese prisons for writing a single wall poster in 1978 calling for democracy as a "fifth modernization." Released and exiled in November 1997 under international pressure, he has lived and continued his advocacy in the United States since.

Chen Guangcheng, the blind, self-taught lawyer who had documented forced abortions under China's family-planning enforcement, escaped house arrest in April 2012 and made his way to the US Embassy in Beijing. A tense diplomatic negotiation secured his exit, and he arrived at New York University a month later.

The human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng never made it to America himself. His wife, Geng He, and their two children fled through Thailand and reached the United States in January 2009, granted refuge while Gao remained in China, in and out of detention, his whereabouts uncertain in the years since. His family's asylum is the American side of this case. His absence from it is the point.

Four names, four routes Embassy refuge, prison and exile, a negotiated diplomatic exit, and a family granted asylum while the person at the center of the case stayed behind.

Sources: contemporaneous reporting on each individual's case is extensive and well corroborated across major outlets; specific court filings or immigration case numbers for each asylum grant have not yet been located and should be added before this entry is treated as fully sourced.