HONG KONG (AP) _One of China’s most wanted dissident intellectuals, the author of the controversial “River Elegy” television series, has escaped China and says the many people who aided him are all in “extreme danger.”

“I’ve been living in terror for the past 100 days,” journalist Su Xiaokang said in an interview 100 days after Chinese troops opened fire on unarmed citizens in Beijing crushing a movement for freedom.

“A lot of my friends have been arrested, a lot. I haven’t seen my wife or my little boy since the massacre. The pressure on me has been intense.”

Su said he left China about 10 days ago with several other dissidents also wanted by the Beijing government.

His escape contradicts recent reports in Chinese-language newspapers that the “underground railroad” to help dissidents and students has been cut.

One activist who helped arrange Su’s flight said Chinese security forces “have not been able to shut the operation down.”

So far, the activist said, more than 55 dissidents and student participants in the movement for freedom have fled China, among them student leader Wu’er Kaixi, political scientist Yan Jiaqi and Marxist theoretician Su Shaozhi.

Most have either gone or intend to go on the United States or to France, where Su went today. Some are waiting in Hong Kong for travel papers.

Still, Chinese authorities have been successful at crushing several other smaller “railroads,” run by Hong Kong-based activists and students, arresting several Chinese student leaders and people helping them escape.

In the interview Tuesday, Su declined to reveal details of his flight to freedom: “I was helped by many, many people and they are all in extreme danger … Suffice it to say I was trembling every day.

“My nerves are frayed, completely. It’s hard going underground in a country like China. I felt like there were eyes watching me everywhere,” he added. “People are afraid now, everywhere.”

Su was active in the Beijing pro-democracy movement. On May 14, a day after a hunger strike began on Tiananmen Square, he and 11 other well-known liberal intellectuals, including journalist Dai Qing who has since been arrested, went to the vast expanse to plead with the students to leave.

“We love you,” he shouted to the crowd of more than 100,000 people. “The Chinese government is incompetent and it cannot stop the tide of history.”

Since the crackdown, Su’s works have frequently been criticized in the state-run press because they allegedly supported the cause of purged Communist Party boss Zhao Ziyang, who fell from power for supporting the student movement. Su’s writings have been banned in China.

Along with Wu’er Kaixi, Su is by far the widest known escapee. His six-part “River Elegy” television series was shown twice in China in 1988, reaching hundreds of millions of homes.

The series criticized the Chinese people’s fear of authority.

As it described the Yellow River, which has changed course many times in its history killing millions of people, the program questioned Communist China’s turbulent history which has itself left millions dead.

The program marked the beginning of an almost year-long thaw in the arts and political debate. That thaw was frozen over in June when troops invaded Beijing, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians.