Xiao Qiang
Editor in Chief, China Digital Times
Adjunct Professor of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
October 15 at 4:15pm
Hesburgh Center, Room C103
“The Rise of Online Public Opinion and Its Political Impact”
Biography
Xiao Qiang is the founder and editor in chief of China Digital Times, an interactive China news website, as well as the director of the China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. His research and teaching focuses on participatory media, online censorship and propaganda, and citizen blogging and network activism in Chinese cyberspace. The recipient of a 2001 MacArthur Fellowship, he has also been active in developing global principles of Internet freedom of expression and privacy issues.
A theoretical physicist by training, Xiao earned his BS at the University of Science and Technology of China and studied astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame in the late 1980s. He became a full time human rights activist after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Xiao served as the executive director of Human Rights in China, a New York-based NGO, and as vice-chairman of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy. He has spoken frequently at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, testified many times before the US Congress, and lectured on freedom, human rights, and democracy in China in over 40 countries. His articles have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and other publications, and he is a weekly commentator for Radio Free Asia.
