Shen Tong

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Shen Tong (Simplified Chinese: 沈彤; Hanyu Pinyin: Shěn Tóng) is a Chinese dissident who was one of the student leaders in the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Shen Tong was born in 1968, in Beijing. He studied at Peking University from 1986 to 1989, and became one of the student leaders during the 1989 protest in Tiananmen Square. He chaired the committee on dialog with the government. He was on Changan Avenue when Chinese troops opened fire on the students. He had earlier obtained a Chinese passport to study biology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in the United States, so even though he was wanted by the Chinese government he was able to board a plane six days after the massacre on June 4, 1989. That he was able to walk undisguised through police and security officials in the Beijing airport indicates broader support for the student democracy movement than the Chinese government contended at the time.

When he arrived in Boston he went to the Walker Center for Ecumenical Exchange in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The Walker Center for Ecumenical Exchange had in the month before the June 4th massacre invited Chinese students at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to establish phone and fax links with the students in Tiananmen Square and throughout the country. The Walker Center's phone number was memorized by students in Tiananmen Square as a way to provide the world outside Beijing with eye-witness accounts of events as government restrictions on Chinese and Western news media increased.

Shortly after his arrival at the Walker Center, Shen Tong held a press conference, giving the first detailed eye-witness account by a student leader of the Tiananmen Square massacre and of the events that led up to it. Although he was already fluent in English Shen Tong gave his presentation in Mandarin.

He then studied biology at Brandeis University on a Wien Scholarship and later political philosophy at Harvard University and Boston University. He co-authored the book Almost a Revolution, published in 1990, a memoir of his experiences at the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

During his studies in Massachusetts he also founded the Democracy for China Fund to support democratic movements in China and to promote ideas of political freedom and human rights. While at the Walker Center he met Marshall Strauss who had come up to Boston from Washington, DC to volunteer his help for the Chinese student activists based at the Walker Center. Strauss became his mentor in understanding American politics and political organizations. Strauss, experienced in organizational development and fundraising, provided Shen Tong organizational and political sophistication that most other Chinese student activists didn't have.

Shen Tong is currently the founder and CEO of the company VFinity, which makes software tools for media production, archiving, and publishing. He continues to run the foundation for China's democracy movements he founded in 1989. He lives in New York City, and has a daughter and a son.