Title of Lecture: Rising Digital Authoritarianism in China and Its Impact on the World
Xiao Qiang is the Director and Research Scientist of the Counter-Power Lab, a research group focusing on technology and free flow of information in cyberspace, based in the University of California, Berkeley.
Xiao is also an adjunct professor at the School of Information (2012 –present) and the Graduate School of Journalism (2003 -2011) at UC Berkeley. His current research focuses on state censorship, propaganda and disinformation, as well as emerging big data and AI-empowered state surveillance mechanisms in China.
Xiao is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual China news website (2003 – present), which applies cutting edge technologies to aggregate, organize, and recommend online information from and about China.
A theoretical physicist by training, he studied at the University of Science and Technology of China and entered the PhD program (1986–1989) in Astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame. He became a full-time human rights activist after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
He was the Executive Director of Human Rights in China (1991 – 2002). Xiao is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. In 2015, Xiao has been named to Foreign Policy magazine’s Pacific Power Index, a list of “50 people shaping the future of the U.S.-China relationship.”