Chen Pokong (; born December 20, 1963), also known as Jinsong Chen (), is a Chinese-American columnist, political commentator, author, television pundit and YouTuber. Chen played a key role in organizing the democracy movement during the 1989 democracy protest in China, for which he was imprisoned and subsequently exiled to the United States.
Chen was invited to Columbia University as a visiting scholar in 1996, and later obtained a master's degree of MPA..
Before moving to the United States, Chen worked as an assistant professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. He obtained an MPA degree from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Since the late 1990s, Chen has been one of the most influential and extraordinary Chinese political commentators and writers. Chen also co-founded and has been serving as the president of an international school in New York, the Bluedata International Institute.
Chen has been providing commentary for Radio Free Asia since 1997, and had regularly appeared on Voice of America's weekly Pros and Cons show for decades.
Chen has been invited to visit Taiwan several times and has met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in both 2010 and 2019. In 2009, he was invited to visit Dharamshala, India, where he met with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. Chen Pokong has expressed his firm support for democracy in Taiwan and a free Tibet. He was also invited to speak at the Oxford Union and the Cambridge Union, where he delivered speeches and participated in debates. In these speeches and debates, Chen Pokong called for urgent attention to the threat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He emphasized that this was not just a "China Threat," but rather a CCP Threat, which poses a common threat to both the Chinese people and the people of the world.
Chen has been a prominent member of the "zi meiti" (YouTube)(zh), a campaign known as ‘self-media’ or ‘self-broadcasting’, which came into prominence in 2017 amongst exiled Chinese dissidents. The phenomenon is categorized by the proliferation of routine and online broadcasts on websites such as YouTube. By 2022, Chen had over 421,000 subscribers.
Early life
Chen Pokong (Chinese:) was born in the Sichuan province of China, Chen is a graduate of Hunan University and a postgraduate of Tongji University. As a postgraduate student in 1985, he submitted a joint letter calling for political reform to former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. As one of the student leaders, Chen then co-organized the massive 1986 Chinese student demonstrations in Shanghai calling for democracy.
Chinese democracy movement
In 1985, as a graduate student in Tongji University of Shanghai, Chen wrote a letter to then General Secretary of Chinese Communist Party Hu Yaobang, a known reformist in CCP, calling for political reform to build up a democratic China. This letter was co-signed by 9 other students at Tongji University. Mr. Hu sent two senior officers to meet Chen and his fellow colleagues in Shanghai and listened to their voices and suggestions.
In 1986, Chen co-founded and co-organized a large scale democracy movement in Shanghai called 1986 Student Movement which spreading to more than 15 cities in China, calling for democracy and anti- corruption in China. Then General Secretary Hu Yaobang was later purged by Deng Xiaoping and other senior politicians, accusing Hu of tolerating the student movements led by Chen Pokong and his fellow colleagues and joined by tens of thousands of students and citizens. The 1986 student movement that happened in Shanghai contributed to the nationwide 1989 democracy movement two and half years later, centered in Beijing, known as Tiananmen Square Protests.
In 1989, Chen initiated and organized a large-scale democracy movement in Guangzhou. After establishing a "democracy salon" in Sun Yat-sen University in January, on April 22, Chen joined Chen Wei, Yu Shiwen and other student leaders in launching student protests in Guangzhou in support of the student protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square., after Hu Yaobang suddenly passed away on April 15, 1989. The nationwide protests for democracy lasted for about two months. After the nationwide protests were cracked down by the CCP and it army PLA, Chen was wanted and subsequently arrested by the Chinese government for his leading role in the movement. He then spent the years between 1989 and 1993 in prison and forced labor camps.