Yan Jiaqi

Yan Jiaqi (born December 25, 1942) is a Chinese political scientist and dissident.

Biography
Yan was born on 25 December 1942 in Wujin District, Changzhou, Jiangsu, during the Chinese Civil War. In 1959, he entered the University of Science and Technology of China, and then became the director of the Institute of Political Research of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where he published several essays and papers on political reform. In 1986, he published a "theory of leadership". His most famous book, written in collaboration with his wife Gao Gao, was Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution.

He became a political advisor of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang during the 1980s, and was one of the leading intellectuals supporting the student movement in 1989. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, he fled to Paris, France, where he participated in forming the Federation for a Democratic China and was elected the federation's first president. He was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in 1991, while in exile.

He is a member of the Chinese Constitutional Reform Association and has suggested the formation of a Federal Republic of China.

Jiaqi is one of three subjects in the feature documentary The Exiles (2022) which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.