The second most wanted student leader from China's Tiananmen Square protests was repatriated from Hong Kong Monday in his latest failed bid to return to his homeland and visit his ailing parents.

Wuer Kaixi, who fled to Taiwan after the 1989 protests and the subsequent Chinese government crackdown, was intercepted by the semi-autonomous city's immigration officials after arriving on a plane from Taipei, and was deported a few hours later, according to his lawyer.

The exiled activist had asked the former British colony's government to pass him onto Beijing's authorities so that he could return to his country for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.

"Immigration has repatriated him on the same flight to Taiwan," Kenneth Lam, a Hong Kong-based lawyer who had been with the activist at the airport to provide assistance, told reporters at the city's Chek Lap Kok airport.

Wuer has made several recent attempts to return to China where he is still listed by Beijing as the second most wanted person following the 1989 crackdown.

He says he is willing to risk going home to see his ailing parents after 24-years of exile.

In 2009, the 45-year-old was repatriated to Taiwan after he attempted to enter the city of Macau, the Chinese gambling centre under Beijing's control.

In 2010, he was arrested after entering the Chinese embassy in Tokyo.

"When I stepped off the plane, immigration officials at the exit of the jet bridge led me to the their office," Wuer told AFP by phone before he was deported.

"I expressed clearly...I was turning myself in and asked them for their assistance," the activist, who had used a Thailand-bound air ticket to arrive in Hong Kong, said.

"Since 1989, I have been in exile for 24 years, and have not been able to see my parents and other family members," he said in an online statement dated Monday.

"My parents are old and in ill health. The Chinese government refuses to issue passports for them to travel aboard and visit me," he said.

He told AFP that his father had heart disease and his mother had suffered a stroke.

Wuer, who hails from China's Uighur ethnic minority, managed to flee to Hong Kong before arriving in Taiwan, where he now lives, after the bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989.

An official Chinese Communist Party verdict after the Tiananmen protests branded the movement a "counter-revolutionary rebellion".

A prominent student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square, Wuer gained fame for openly criticising then premier Li Peng during a dialogue with students in 1989.

Since returning to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong enjoys a level of civil liberty that is unavailable in China under the so-called "One Country Two Systems" which guarantees the city a semi-autonomous status.

Every year, tens of thousands of residents gather at the city's Victoria Park to mark the crackdown.