Shen Tong

Personal Background

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 lives in New York City. He has two daughters and a son. His father and sister Shen Qing both went to Peking University, and his mother is a medical doctor.

Business & Media Ventures

Shen Tong moved from Massachusetts to New York in year 2000 focusing more exclusively on businesses with impact and purpose, and creative writing. He founded Food-X and ""FoodFutureCo"" in New York City working closely with Danielle Nierenberg, Dan Barber, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, Michael Moss, and Michel Nischan. His has several dozen publicly known commercial and impact investments.

He was the founder and president of the company VFinity, which makes software tools and web applications for multimedia and multilingual search, media production, archiving, and media distribution. He is known for his promotion of "Context Media" partially due to his keynote speech at a super session of National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, 2007. His media businesses in 1990s included TV production B&B Media Production, with the Boston-based foundation he chaired being the lead investor and providing senior management, and investment in bookstore and publishing in Beijing. B&B Media Production had created and produced several highly circulated and acclaimed TV programs, including No.1 rated national weekend prime time show Tell It Like It Is during its first season.

Political & Social Activism

In 2011, Shen voiced support for and participated in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. He was considered a main proponent of non-violence, of social media movement with nationally coordinated organization working with broad alliances, for strategic messaging.

He co-chaired the committee on dialog with the government during the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. 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. He was able to walk undisguised through police and security officials in the Beijing airport, possibly indicating broader support for the student democracy movement than the Chinese government contended at the time. Some of the biographical works about Shen Tong are Tiananmen Exiles, Standoff at Tiananmen.

Shortly after his arrival in the United States, Shen Tong held a press conference at the Walker Center for Ecumenical Exchange in Newton, Massachusetts, 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.

During his studies in Massachusetts he founded the Democracy for China Fund to support democratic movements in China and to promote ideas of political freedom and human rights. American NGO activist Marshall Strauss, and program coordinator Juanita Scheyett-Cheng, helped Shen Tong in founding and operating of the Fund. Coretta Scott King, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Kerry Kennedy, among other Western political and NGO figures and sinologists were associated with Shen Tong's organization in 1990s. The Congressional Human Rights Delegation to China in 1991 headed by Nancy Pelosi was organized by the Democracy for China Fund with the help and funding from Hong Kong Democrats. His 1992 trip back to China led to the arrest of him and his associates. He was released and immediately exiled after only two months of imprisonment under mounting international pressure especially from the US Congress, the Presidential Campaign of Bill Clinton, the Vatican, and European governments. In May 1993, days before the renewal of China's Most Favored Nation trading status by the US government, Shen Tong was scheduled to give a speech at the United Nations press club, but was barred by UN General Secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali due to strong protest from the Chinese government. He is known to be also associated with Chinese dissident activists and writers Liu Xiaobo, Wu'er Kaixi, Hu Ping, Ma Jian, Shi Tao, Tibetan exile leader Dalai Lama, Taiwan politician Ma Yingjiu.

Cultural Activities

Shen Tong serves on the board of Food Tank since 2015, Poets & Writers since 2008-2014. He studied biology at Brandeis University on a Wien Scholarship and later in doctorate programs in political philosophy at Harvard University and sociology at Boston University with Harvey Mansfield, Peter Berger, Daniel Bell, Samuel P. Huntington, and Michael Sandel.

In films and television, Shen Tong has been an actor, producer, and film festival sponsor and speaker. Shen Tong starred in Out of Exile with co-star Sharif Atkins in 2000. He worked with Arte, ABC News and Jean-François Bizot's Actuel magazine to produce Clandestins en Chine which premiered in a Paris theater and on Arte in 1992. He co-starred with actress Hu Zongwen in a made-for-TV two parts movie, which received the 6th Fei Tian National Award in 1986.

As a writer, he co-authored the book Almost a Revolution, published in 1990, a memoir of his life growing up in China and his experiences at the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. He carried on a diverse writing career with political commentary, scholarly essays, film critics, literary prose, and movie scripts in English and in Chinese, including publications in China under the pseudonym Rong Di. He holds honorary Ph.D. in 1991 from St. Ambrose University.

Shen Tong also founded higher education and culture focused NGO in the mid-1990s, a center in Budapest for liberal scholars, journalists, writers, and educators studying transitional society with funding from Open Society Institute and Central European University of George Soros, a literature review magazine with Chinese dissident poets and writers with support from Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, and Elie Wiesel.