Lü Jinghua

In January 2011, Lü was one of the few exiled dissidents allowed to attend the funeral of Hong Kong activist and politician Szeto Wah in Hong Kong. In April 2016, Lü attempted to travel to India to attend the Interfaith Conference of China's ethnic and religious minorities, and to meet with the Dalai Lama, but was denied entry. She claimed that the Chinese government was a factor behind the cancellations, given both her role in the Tiananmen protests and the Chinese government's stance towards Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The Indian government denied this, however, arguing that Lü had applied for the wrong category of visa.

Lü attempted to return to China in 1992 to see her mother and daughter, but was denied entry at Beijing Capital International Airport. In 1994, her daughter was able to join Lü in New York. When her parents died in 1998 and 1999, the Chinese government refused to grant Lü visas to attend their funerals.

For a time she worked in a grocery store in Los Angeles, before moving to New York. Through her high-profile appearances and activism with human rights organizations, Lü came to the attention of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), who hired her in 1990. She worked as an organizer and educator with the ILGWU until 1996 when the organization merged the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. In 1996, she switched to building computer systems; today she sells real estate.

Since leaving China, Lu has campaigned extensively for workers rights and for democracy in China. In 1990, she met with US senators and the AFL-CIO to try and convince them to campaign for the release of Chinese workers, particularly those imprisoned in the aftermath of the Tiananmen protests. Also in 1990, she was honoured by Human Rights Watch for her efforts on behalf of imprisoned labour activists in China. As of 2017, Lü is serving as Vice Chair for the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, an organization founded in 1983 by Wang Bingzhang that advocates for human rights and the democratization of China.

After troops moved into the square on June 3–4, Lü helped destroy the lists of BWAF members before evacuating. On June 8, the Martial Law Command declared the BWAF an illegal organization, ordered it to disband, and designated its leaders as among "the main instigators and organizers in the capital of the counter-revolutionary rebellion." In the aftermath of the crackdown, when many members of the BWAF were arrested, Lü spent several weeks absconding: first hiding in a friend's apartment, before fleeing to Hebei Province in the northeast, where her husband was working (her husband, Li Zhilang, would serve seven months in prison for sheltering her after the crackdown). On August 19, she was placed on the Chinese government's most wanted list as a "major criminal who has not yet been caught," being the only female worker to be on the placed on the list. Eventually Lü reached Guangzhou. There, an underground railroad had been set up by Hong Kong activists and journalists, and, on August 23, she was able to slip across the border to safety in Hong Kong. In December 1989, five months after she applied for political asylum at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong, she arrived in Los Angeles as a political refugee.

Lü Jinghua (Chinese: 吕京花; pinyin: Lǚ Jīnghuā; born 1960) is a Chinese dissident and activist, and was a key member of the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation (BWAF) during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The BWAF was the People's Republic of China's (PRC) first independent trade union, established as an alternative to the Party-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions, and Lü served as the union's broadcaster. After the June 4th crackdown, Lü was placed on China's most wanted list, and subsequently fled to the United States.

Lü was born in Chongqing to Party loyalist parents. Her father had become a Party member before the establishment of the PRC in 1949, and her mother was a neighbourhood activist during the Cultural Revolution. Lü attended Yucai Middle School, where most of her classmates were the sons and daughters of People's Liberation Army officers. She attended art school for a year and then held a number of jobs, none of them lasting for long: in a trading company in Guangzhou, on a chicken farm in the countryside near Beijing, and, in 1986, as manager of a privately owned dress shop, also called a getihu.