32 Facts About Shen Tong

Shen Tong is an American impact investor, activist, and writer.

Shen Tong was a Chinese dissident who was exiled as one of the student leaders in the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Shen Tong studied biology at Peking University, from 1986 to 1989.

Shen Tong has several dozen publicly known commercial and impact investments.

In 2015, Shen Tong founded and served as the managing partner of FoodFutureCo, another business accelerator and impact investment firm which focuses on scale-up stage food, agriculture, social, and environmental entrepreneurship; followed by TheFutureCo which expand into Web3 in 2021, and HWC in 2023.

In 2021, Shen Tong became the advisor and mentor of the Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis for Axie Infinity, a Pokemon-inspired non-fungible token-based online video game where anyone can earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem.

Shen Tong's Web3FutureCo made other Web3 and Blockchain investments with activities in the Philippines and the US.

Shen Tong was the founder and president of the now defunct VFinity, company which made software tools and web applications for multimedia and multilingual search, media production, archiving, and media distribution.

Shen Tong 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.

Shen Tong co-chaired the committee on dialogue with the government during the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China.

Shen Tong was on Changan Avenue when Chinese troops opened fire on the students.

Shen Tong had earlier obtained a Chinese passport to study biology at Brandeis University 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.

Shen Tong 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 biographical works about Shen Tong are Tiananmen Exiles and 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.

Shen Tong helped established Radio Free Asia with bipartisan efforts led by then Senator Joe Biden in the 1990s.

American NGO activist Marshall Strauss and program coordinator Juanita Scheyett-Cheng helped Shen Tong found and operate the Fund.

Shen Tong was released and immediately exiled after two months of imprisonment under mounting international pressure, particularly 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 Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali due to strong protest from the Chinese government.

Shen Tong is known to be associated with Chinese dissident activists and writers Liu Xiaobo, Wu'er Kaixi, Hu Ping, Ma Jian, Shi Tao, the Tibetan exile leader Dalai Lama, and the Taiwanese politician Ma Yingjiu.

Shen Tong is one of the narrators of the 2019 documentary Tiananmen: The People Versus the Party by PBS, BBC, and continental European TV networks.

Shen Tong is considered a main proponent of nonviolence, social media movement, nationally coordinated organization working with broad alliances, and strategic messaging.

Shen Tong founded a 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, as well as a literature review magazine with Chinese dissident poets and writers with support from Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, and Elie Wiesel.

Shen Tong served as a venture partner of SOSV, a global multi-stage venture capital fund, after acting as general partner.

Shen Tong appeared in the 2022 documentary The Exiles, a documentary film which tracked down three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Shen Tong appeared as one of the main subjects in PBS Documentary Tiananmen: The People Versus the Party in 2019.

Shen Tong starred in Out of Exile with co-star Sharif Atkins in 2000.

Shen Tong worked with Arte, ABC News and Jean-Francois Bizot's Actuel magazine to produce Clandestins en Chine, including interviews with Jane Birkin, which premiered in a Paris theater and on Arte in 1992.

Shen Tong co-starred with actress Hu Zongwen in a made-for-TV two parts movie, which received the 6th Fei Tian National Award in 1986.

Shen Tong's work has been profiled by major media around the world in several languages by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC, CNN, BBC, CBS, NHK, TVB, The Guardian, Le Monde, Fortune, among others.

Shen Tong 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.

Shen Tong's father and sister Shen Qing both went to Peking University, and his mother is a medical doctor.