Xiao Qiang

Xiao Qiang
Personal details
Born 19 November 1961
China
This is a Chinese name; the family name is Xiao (蕭).

Xiao Qiang (Chinese: 萧强; pinyin: Xiāo Qiáng) is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bi-lingual China news website. He is an adjunct professor at the School of Information (2012–present) and the Graduate School of Journalism (2003 - 2011), at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on technology and free flow of information in cyberspace, based in the School of Information, UC Berkeley.

Xiao teaches classes Digital Activism, Internet Freedom and Blogging China at both the School of Information and the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. In Fall 2003, Xiao launched China Digital Times to explore how to apply cutting edge technologies to aggregate, organize, and recommend online information from and about China. His current research focuses on mapping political discourses in Chinese cyberspace, measuring the state censorship and control of the Internet, and developing cloud-based technologies which can break through such censorship.

A theoretical physicist by training, Xiao Qiang studied at the University of Science and Technology of China and entered the PhD program (1986–1989) in Astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame. He became a full-time human rights activist after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Xiao was the Executive Director of the New York-based NGO Human Rights in China from 1991 to 2002 and vice-chairman of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy.

Xiao is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, and is profiled in the book Soul Purpose: 40 People Who Are Changing the World for the Better, (Melcher Media, 2003). He was also a visiting fellow of the Santa Fe Institute in Spring, 2002.

In January 2015, Xiao has been named to Foreign Policy magazine’s Pacific Power Index, a list of “50 people shaping the future of the U.S.-China relationship.” He was named on the list “for taking on China’s Great Firewall of censorship.”[1]

References

CDT - Xiao Qiang Bio

  1. "The Pacific Power Index", Foreign Policy Jan. 19, 2015, Accessed here: http://pacificpower.foreignpolicy.com

External links