Amid the buzz last month around the arrival in China of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, one person seems to have slipped by largely unnoticed: Li Lu , one of the student leaders during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 who is still on the central government's wanted list.
Li, now a highly successful hedge fund manager in the US and, according to some, the chosen successor to Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, has been banned from entering China since fleeing to France and then the United States following the government crackdown in 1989.
However, Li was part of Buffett's entourage when he visited Shenzhen for the first time for a recent BYD shareholders convention.
An employee at Himalaya Capital, Li's US hedge fund, confirmed his presence in Shenzhen, but Li was unavailable for comment on the details of the visit or visa arrangement with the central government.
Leaked government directives to state media, confirmed Li's presence, with a directive from the Guangdong provincial propaganda bureau telling mainland journalists attending the BYD stockholders convention that they were 'only allowed to take pictures of Warren Buffett, and not of Li Lu'.
Security during the convention was extremely tight, and foreign media were barred from attending.