However, disillusioned by the Cultural Revolution, he participated in the 1976 Tiananmen Incident and co-founded an influential literary journal, called Jintian (Today), that came to be officially banned in China.

After his poetry and activism were an inspiration to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao was banned from China and entered a period of exile in the West, living and teaching in numerous countries before settling in the United States.

Bei Dao has been described as having played a significant role in creating a new form of poetry in Chinese literature, one that is often viewed as a reaction to the artistic strictures of the Mao era.

On his father's side, he traces his lineage to the reign of the Kangxi Emperor, when his ancestor, Zhao Bingyan, was the provincial governor of Hunan and deputy minister of justice.

However, due to war and internal strife in China, the family's fortune declined, and his paternal grandfather earned a modest living selling paintings and scrolls before dying when Bei Dao's father was still a child.

[5] After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, one of Bei Dao's maternal aunts was personal nurse to Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing.

Writing in his memoir, City Gate, Open Up, Bei Dao describes his memory of that period:Hunger gradually devoured our lives.

)[18] Having not been selected for induction into the People's Liberation Army, Bei Dao spent the first two years of the Cultural Revolution immersed in political activities as a member of a Red Guard faction based at his high school.

[20] The students there formed a commune composed of two Red Guard factions dedicated to promoting the ideals of the revolution, for which Bei Dao assisted in disseminating propaganda.

[21] On a regional tour in 1966, he and his fellow Red Guard members helped bring an end to a siege of the Anting train station by anti-Maoist protestors, an incident that gave rise to the Shanghai People's Commune.

[23] In 1967, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially disavowed the Red Guards due to their frequently violent tactics and disruptive effect on the national economy, and by the following year had largely succeeded in dismantling the movement.

[31] His parents were sent to May Seventh Cadre School to undergo "ideological thought reform"; accused of living a bourgeois lifestyle (for, among other things, employing a nanny) they faced isolation, interrogation, and hard labor.

[34] In his memoir, Bei Dao writes, "At this pivotal point in my life, I tried to reassess the past and peer into the future, but everything seemed fuzzy, indiscernible, my heart empty, vacuous".

Inspired by his experience, he wrote what became his most famous poem, "The Answer," which has been compared to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" for its impact on a generation of Chinese.

[43] When that campaign ended, his work appeared again in Chinese in a Communist Party publication called An Anthology of New Trends in Poetry, which Bei Dao has credited with having "a profound and wide-reaching influence" in China.

[49] When the government denounced the petition, Bei Dao and fellow activists held a press conference to announce an organized effort to promote democracy and human rights in China.

[51] On June 4, 1989, when the Chinese military forcibly ended the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, resulting in a mass number of casualties, Bei Dao was in West Berlin as a writer-in-residence at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

[54] Speaking to foreign television outlets upon her escape from China, the student protest leader Chai Ling demonstrated the influence of Bei Dao's work when she quoted from his poem, "Declaration": "I will not kneel on the ground / allowing the executioners to look tall / the better to obscure the wind of freedom".

After his term as a visiting writer in West Berlin, he spent much of 1990 in Scandinavia, where, in Oslo, he and fellow exiles decided to revive Jintian as an émigré journal.

While he received support from numerous institutions and individuals, his separation from family weighed heavily; he has spoken of the emotional distress he experienced during this period.

Beginning in 2014, Bei Dao served as editor for a series of books for children, an initiative he undertook after he was disappointed by the quality of poetry his son was taught in school.

[76] In his essay collections, Bei Dao has written about the many friendships he has made during his travels, including with notable literary figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Breyten Breytenbach, Tomas Tranströmer, Gary Snyder, and others.

As McDougall notes, he has "sought to find new formal devices within the general category of 'free verse'…Conventional but dispensable grammatical forms and punctuation disappear between intensely compressed images; subject, tense, and number are elusive; transitions are unclear; order and logic are supplied by the reader".

[100] By using such an experimental approach, Bei Dao has achieved what the poet and critic Michael Palmer has called "a poetry of complex enfoldings and crossings, of sudden juxtapositions and fractures, of pattern in a dance with randomness".

[101] This approach to poetic form earned Bei Dao his moniker as a "misty" poet, which was originally leveled pejoratively by Chinese critics who disliked his work for its lack of clarity.

She elaborates that "his verse is not obscure just because of fear of censorship but because the pain caused by all forms of oppression is so intense that conventional epithets are too shallow to express it".

Palmer has described the work of Bei Dao—and of all of the Misty Poets—as "a complex interweaving of inner and outer worlds, the private and the public, the personal and the official, the oneiric and the quotidian, the classical and the contemporary".

[104] Similarly, the scholar Dian Li argues that Bei Dao's embrace of paradox is rooted in both Western tradition—e.g., Plato's Parmenides—and Eastern tradition—e.g., popular folk tales like one about a blacksmith who creates both an invincible sword and an impenetrable shield—and by placing opposites together, one can arrive at a truth that is "multiple, undifferentiated, and indeterminate".

McDougall argues that this preoccupation in Bei Dao's work is "not a pretended or temporary escape from society" but rather "a commitment to non-political communication between people and the realization of the self".

According to the scholar Vera Schwarcz, the Cultural Revolution's use of manifestos, slogans, and propaganda, with their underlying threat of oppression and violence, turned even innocent imagery (the sun and sky, for example) into ominous symbols.