Wikipedia

Shen Tong

Shen Tong (Simplified Chinese: 沈彤; Hanyu Pinyin: Shěn Tóng; born 1968) is an American impact investor, activist, and writer. He founded business accelerators FoodFutureCo in 2015 and Food-X in 2014, the latter of which is recognized by Fast Company as one of "The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in Food".[1] He was a Chinese dissident who was exiled as one of the student leaders in the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989.[2] Shen was one of the People of the Year in Newsweek 1989,[citation needed] and he became a media, software, social entrepreneur, and investor in the late 1990s. He serves on the board of Food Tank.

Shen Tong
沈彤
Shen Tong at 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre in Washington, D.C.
Born1968 (age 55–56)
Beijing, China
CitizenshipUnited States
EducationPeking University (BA)
Brandeis University (BS)
Harvard University
Boston University (PhD)
Occupation(s)Investor, activist, author, philanthropist
Title
In this Chinese name, the family name is Shen.

Early life and education

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Shen Tong was born in 1968, in Beijing. He studied biology at Peking University (Beida 北大), from 1986 to 1989. Having witnessed the brutal crackdown of protestors in the avenue leading to Tiananmen Square, he said that it accidentally made him one of the key student leaders during the June Fourth Incident in 1989.[3]

Upon fleeing China for the United States, Shen transferred to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on a Wien International Scholarship, where he finished a Bachelor of Science degree in botany and genetics in 1991.[4] After graduating from Brandeis, Shen enrolled to the PhD programs in philosophy at Harvard University, and in sociology at Boston University, studying with mentors such as Harvey Mansfield, Peter Berger, Daniel Bell, Samuel P. Huntington, and Michael Sandel.

Career

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Social entrepreneurship

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Shen Tong is a serial entrepreneur since 1990s and impact investor with more than fifty investments in food, media, and other high-tech ventures. After moving to New York City from Massachusetts in 2000, he focused on business ventures with impact and purpose related to food, media, and high-tech industries.[5][6] He has several dozen publicly known commercial and impact investments.[7][8] Collaborating with renowned figures such as Dan Barber, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, Michael Moss, and Michel Nischan, he founded Food-X in 2014, a startup accelerator that supported businesses with a positive impact on the food sector, running 11 cohorts until it ceased operations in 2020. In 2015, Shen also 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.

Shen’s portfolio of good food and sustainable agriculture holdings includes over 50 investments in 40 companies and continues to grow.[citation needed] His other social entrepreneurship portfolio includes companies such as WeFunder. His thesis of cultivating tasty, sustainable, healthy, accessible, and affordable food and agriculture businesses is explained in his TEDx Talk in addition to numerous speeches at Fancy Food Show, Esca Bona, Vitagora, Concordia, James Beard Foundation, Food Tank, Seed to Chips, Harvard Business School, BevNet, etc. The companies Shen has founded or co-founded have had numerous financial exits including VFinity, DCF, B&B Media, and GA Media.  Two other financial exits came from his venture investments.  He works with social entrepreneurs to build financially sustainable and impactful businesses.  

Media ventures

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Shen was the founder and president of the now defunct VFinity,[9] company which made software tools and web applications for multimedia and multilingual search, media production, archiving, and media distribution. The founding idea was based on two patents.[10][11] 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.[12] He founded the TV production company B&B Media Production and invested in bookstores and publishing in Beijing. B&B Media Production had created and produced several highly circulated and acclaimed TV programs, including the national weekend primetime show Tell It Like It Is during its first season.[13][14]

In 2021, Shen became the advisor and mentor of the Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis for Axie Infinity, a Pokémon-inspired non-fungible token-based online video game where anyone can earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem.[15] The unique aspect of Axie Infinity is that all art assets and Axie genetic data are readily available to third parties, enabling community developers to craft their own tools and create diverse experiences within the Axie Infinity universe.

Humanitarian, political, and social activism

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Student activism

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Shen co-chaired the committee on dialogue 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 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[16] and Standoff at Tiananmen.[17]

Chinese democracy advocacy in the United States

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Shortly after his arrival in the United States, Shen 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[18] to support democratic movements in China and to promote ideas of political freedom and human rights. Shen Tong also 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 found and operate the Fund. Coretta Scott King,[19] John Kerry, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Nancy Pelosi, Kerry Kennedy, among other Western political and NGO figures and sinologists, were associated with Shen's organization in the 1990s. The Congressional Human Rights Delegation to China in 1991 headed by Nancy Pelosi and Republican congressman John R. Miller 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 his and his associates' arrest.[20] He 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.[21][22] In May 1993, days before the renewal of China's Most Favored Nation trading status by the US government, Shen was scheduled to give a speech at the United Nations press club,[23] but was barred by UN Secretary-General 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, the Tibetan exile leader Dalai Lama, and the Taiwanese politician Ma Yingjiu. He is one of the narrators of the 2019 documentary Tiananmen: The People Versus the Party by PBS, BBC, and continental European TV networks.[24] The documentary is a 2-hour show special about 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, "uncover[ing] the true story of the seven-week period that changed China forever".

Occupy Wall Street

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In 2011, Shen supported the Occupy Wall Street movement.[25] He is considered a main proponent of nonviolence,[26] social media movement,[27] nationally coordinated organization working with broad alliances,[28] and strategic messaging.[29] Believing in the power of a decentralized movement to combat the social and economic injustices that contribute to a dysfunctional democracy, he held planning meetings with protesters in his Broadway office.

COVID-19 relief efforts

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When the COVID-19 pandemic reached New York, The New York Times reported Shen's "just-in-time" relief efforts during the first weeks of the pandemic outbreak in New York through his private networks in March 2020.[30]

Cultural activities

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External videos
  Booknotes interview with Shen Tong on Almost a Revolution, December 16, 1990, C-SPAN

Civil society

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Shen served on the board of two non-profit organizations: Food Tank since 2015[31] and Poets & Writers from 2008 to 2014. Shen also 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 is on Omnicom's sparks&honey Influencer Advisory Board, in addition to serving on boards and advisory boards for the Good Food Institute and being a member of NEXUS Global Summit. He also served as a venture partner of SOSV, a global multi-stage venture capital fund, after acting as general partner.

Media engagements

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In films and television, Shen has been an actor, producer, and film festival sponsor and speaker (including Tribeca Film Festival).[32] Shen appeared in the 2022 documentary The Exiles, a documentary film which tracked down three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre. It won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance 2022. Shen also appeared as one of the main subjects in PBS Documentary Tiananmen: The People Versus the Party[33] in 2019. He also starred in Out of Exile[34] with co-star Sharif Atkins in 2000.[35]

He worked with Arte, ABC News and Jean-François Bizot's Actuel magazine[36] to produce Clandestins en Chine, including interviews with Jane Birkin, which premiered in a Paris theater and on Arte in 1992.[37] He co-starred with actress Hu Zongwen in a made-for-TV two parts movie,[38] which received the 6th Fei Tian National Award in 1986.[citation needed]

Shen’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.

Literature

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As a writer, Shen 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,[39] including publications in China under the pseudonym Rong Di.[40][41]

Honorary degrees

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He holds an honorary Ph.D. in 1991 from St. Ambrose University.[42]

Personal life

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He lives in New York City along with his three children.[43] His father and sister Shen Qing both went to Peking University, and his mother is a medical doctor.

Notes

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  1. ^ "The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in Food". Fast Company. Archived from the original on 2015-02-11. Retrieved 17 June 2024.
  2. ^ NPR's The Story: After Tiananmen, June, 2007 Archived 2010-06-21 at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ^ Lim, Louisa (2009-06-03). "Student Leaders Reflect, 20 Years After Tiananmen". NPR. Retrieved 2023-07-22.
  4. ^ "Shen Tong '91 on the Front Line Against Coronavirus". 2020-04-19. Retrieved 2023-07-22.
  5. ^ Ten Questions with Shen Tong, Founder and Managing Partner of FoodFutureCo
  6. ^ Shen Tong: Accelerating Change [Q&A]
  7. ^ use whole-food, prepare and preserve. Let's not highly process anything when it comes to food
  8. ^ foods ripe for disruption from local nutritional brands
  9. ^ Information Week: High Five: Meet Shen Tong, President Of VFinity, Jan 2007
  10. ^ Patents
  11. ^ Patents
  12. ^ NAB Super Session Keynote Speech: Social Media in the 21st Century by Shen Tong (CEO, VFinity)
  13. ^ CCTV 实话实说节目
  14. ^ 14 years running talk show "Tell It Like It Is" as No.1 rated show in China 2010
  15. ^ Shen Tong
  16. ^ Tiananmen Exiles, by Perry Link & Rowena Xiaoqing He
  17. ^ Standoff at Tiananmen by Eddie Cheng
  18. ^ Use Trade Policy To Pressure China July 21, 1991|By Shen Tong, Chairman, Democracy for China Fund
  19. ^ Shen Tong's speech at the Church where Martin Luther King worked, is republished in Senator Rober Torricelli In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century, Simon & Schuster, October 2000
  20. ^ New York Times, "In 1992, Ross Terrill traveled to China with Shen Tong, a dissident living in Boston. He was quickly arrested and put on a plane to Hong Kong. Mr. Shen was likewise arrested and held for 54 days before being expelled.
  21. ^ 74 Senators Urge China to Free Activist; Shen Tong, Others Arrested as They Tried to Open Rights Office
  22. ^ The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means For The United States, by Ross Terrill
  23. ^ U.N. Chief Bars Chinese Dissident
  24. ^ "Tiananmen Square Protesters recount massacre 30 years later". CBS News.
  25. ^ Firger, Jessica (11 November 2011). "Occupy Wall Street Protests Find Unlikely Father Figure". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2023-02-05.
  26. ^ RollingStone June 2012
  27. ^ No.7 in World Most Innovative 50 by Fast Company
  28. ^ "99% Solidarity national bus project, ABC News Chicago". Archived from the original on 2014-02-03. Retrieved 2019-07-30.
  29. ^ Fast Company Profile, Occupy Wall Street’s Philosopher-In-Residence
  30. ^ Gorce, Tammy La (2020-04-05). "Chinese-Americans, Facing Abuse, Unite to Aid Hospitals in Coronavirus Battle". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  31. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2015-12-08. Retrieved 2015-11-27.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  32. ^ Sponsoring Tribeca Film Festival through Vfinity
  33. ^ Tiananmen: The People Versus the Party 2019 ‧ 1 season
  34. ^ IMDB Title: Out of Exile (2001)
  35. ^ Clip of Out Of Exile
  36. ^ fr:Actuel (magazine)
  37. ^ IMDB Title: Clandestins en Chine (TV 1992)
  38. ^ IMDB Title: TV 1985
  39. ^ One of Shen Tong's personal blogs
  40. ^ 容迪，“在自我与社群中的自由主义”
  41. ^ 论精英在历史变革中的作用 容 迪
  42. ^ St. Ambrose University Commencement Speakers Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine
  43. ^ The birth of his 1st child was mentioned in this article by Prospect Magazine
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