Xu Jiatun

Xu Jiatun (Chinese: 许家屯; 10 March 1916 – 29 June 2016) was a Chinese politician and dissident. He was the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Jiangsu Province from 1977 to 1983 and the Governor of Jiangsu from 1977 to 1979. After sympathising with the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, he left the country and lived in self-exile in the United States.

Career

Xu was the member of the 11th and 12th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from 1977 to 1987. He was the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Jiangsu Province from 1977 to 1983 and the Governor of Jiangsu from 1977 to 1979. He became the director of the Hong Kong branch of the Xinhua News Agency from 1983 to 1989, then China's de facto political presence in the territory. He participated in the preparatory works of the establishment of the Hong Kong SAR and was vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee.

Xu sympathised with the Tiananmen Square student protests in 1989. After the military crackdown in June, he fled to the United States and lived there in exile. He was later expelled from the Communist Party. In 1994, he published memoirs.

Xu later lived in Orange County, California, United States. In 1997, he joined an appeal to the Communist Party Congress meeting in Beijing to reverse the government report condemning the 1989 Tiananmen student protests. In an interview with Initium Media in 2016, after a stay in hospital, Xu, in an interview with the Hong Kong journalist Simon Kei shek Ming, predicted that Xi Jinping would arrest "higher level" tigers in the Communist Party. He died in June 2016 at the age of 100.