During and after the repression of the protests were held attempts to arrest and persecute the leaders of the Democratic Movement of China, especially Wang Dan, Chai Ling and Wu'er Kaixi. Wang Dan was imprisoned and sent to prison, and was later allowed to emigrate to the United States. Wu'er Kaixi fled to Taiwan. He is currently married and works as a political commentator on Taiwanese National Television. Chai Ling fled to France and later moved to the United States.
Workers who were arrested in Beijing were tried and executed. However, students, many from relatively influential families, received much softer sentences. Even Wang Dan, the student leader who headed the list of the most wanted, ended up spending only seven years in prison.
Moreover, in the days immediately following the dissolution of the protests, the conservative wing of the Communist Party attempted to remove some of the market liberalization reforms that had been undertaken as part of China's economic reform and restore administrative controls over the economy. However, these efforts encountered the hard resistance of the rulers of the provinces and were completely abandoned in the early 1990s due to the end of the Soviet Union and the so-called "trip to the south" of Deng Xiaoping, a visit the Chinese leader made in 1993 to areas in the south where more ambitious economic reforms had begun. The "trip to the south" was a demonstration of the competence of the reforms by the Chinese leader, in front of the conservative sectors that wanted to paralyze or even reverse many of these measures. The continuation of economic reform led to intense economic growth in the 1990s, which gave the government a large share of the support it had lost in 1989. Moreover, none of the current leaders of the Chinese government played a decisive role in and one of the prominent figures of the government, the current Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, was aide to Zhao Ziyang and accompanied him in his meetings with the demonstrators.
