Xiao Qiang is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual China news website launched in 2003 to aggregate, organize, and recommend online information from and about China. He is an adjunct professor at the School of Information, University of California at Berkeley, as well as the Director of the school's Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on the intersection of digital media, counter-censorship technology and cyberactivism.
A theoretical physicist by training, Xiao Qiang studied at the University of Science and Technology of China and entered the Ph.D. 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 received a 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.
Xiao has published numerous articles on China, human rights, and Internet politics in the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the Los Angeles Times, the South China Morning Post, and other major publications. He is also a weekly commentator for Radio Free Asia.
