Baiqiao Tang is a Chinese political dissident from Hunan province who led student protests during the 1989 democracy movement. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Tang fled from agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who eventually arrested him in the city of Jiangmen. He was charged with being a counter-revolutionary and imprisoned. Upon his release, he fled to Hong Kong, where he co-authored the report Anthems of Defeat: Crackdown in Hunan Province 1989 - 1992 through Human Rights Watch with Dr. Robin Munro of the University of London. Tang was later accepted into the United States as a political refugee in 1992. Tang claimed that he graduated in 2003 with a Master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University, but university archive and registrar of Columbia University claimed that he studied there but did not graduate.

Yongzhou(Chinese: 永州) is a prefecture-level city in the south of Hunan province, People's Republic of China, located on the southern bank of the Xiang River, which is formed by the confluence of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, and bordering Guangdong to the southeast and Guangxi to the southwest. With a history of 2000 years, Yongzhou is one of the four ancient counties in Hunan. Its total area is 22,255.31 square kilometres (8,592.82 sq mi), and at the 2022 Chinese census it had a total population of 5,143,700, of whom 1,146,692 lived in the built-up area made of the 2 urban districts.