Xiao Qiang (萧强) is the founder and editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual news and analysis website that documents Chinese internet censorship, propaganda, and online public discourse. He served as a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley from 2009 until his retirement in 2025, and was also an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Earlier, from 2003 to 2009, he was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where he taught courses on China reporting and digital activism.

Trained as a theoretical physicist, Xiao studied at the University of Science and Technology of China and later entered the PhD program in astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame (1986–1989). After the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, he became a full-time human rights activist. From 1991 to 2002 he served as Executive Director of the New York–based organization Human Rights in China and later as vice-chair of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy.

Xiao founded China Digital Times in 2003 to apply new technologies to aggregating, translating, and analyzing online information from and about China. His research has focused on state censorship, propaganda, disinformation, and emerging AI-driven systems of surveillance and social control. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 and was named to Foreign Policy’s Pacific Power Index in 2015 for his work challenging China’s Great Firewall.