Su Xiaokang

Su Xiaokang (Chinese: 苏晓康; born 1949) is an influential intellectual, writer, journalist, political activist and in 1989 was named one of China's seven most-wanted dissident intellectuals. His most notable work River Elegy paved the way to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and his participation in the protest also forced him into the exile in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Su currently resides in Delaware.

Born and raised in Hebei Province, Su came from an intellectual family: His father Su Pei was the vice-president of the Central Party Academy and his mother was a reporter of Guangming Daily. Su attended a technical college for higher education. Due to his intellectual background, he was sent to a rural area as a laborer during the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution, Su became a reporter for Henan Daily and later People's Daily, and served as a lecturer at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and later Beijing Normal University.

Su Xiaokang was highly praised by scholars and intellectuals in the 1980s, seen as one of the most iconic and popular liberal writers. Su wrote the script for the controversial and thought-provoking documentary River Elegy, a six-part documentary that narrated the decline of Chinese civilization and culture, highlighted the differences between the "transparency" of democracy and the "opacity" of an autocracy, and subtly critiqued the political system under Communist Party rule. The documentary was inspirational to numerous university students and became instrumental to the beginning of the Tiananmen Square protests.

Su, along with 50 writers and novelists, participated the protests in May before the arrival of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Su voiced his support to the students and said, "The students should not be allowed to stand alone". On May 19, Su and other intellectuals signed a petition demanding democracy in China:

We, as intellectuals, in the name of our personal integrity and all our moral rectitude, with our body and mind, with all our dignity as individuals, solemnly swear never to retreat in the quest for democracy pioneered by the students with their blood and lives, never under any pretext to disengage ourselves because of cowardice, never to allow again the humiliations of the past, never to sell out our moral integrity, never to submit ourselves to dictatorship, never to pledge allegiance to the last emperors of the China of the 80's.

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