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. ==Bibliography==