Having witnessed the brutal crackdown of protestors in the avenue leading to Tiananmen Square, he said that it accidentally made him one of the key student leaders during the June Fourth Incident in 1989.

[3] Upon fleeing China for the United States, Shen transferred to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on a Wien International Scholarship, where he finished a Bachelor of Science degree in botany and genetics in 1991.

Shen Tong is a serial entrepreneur since 1990s and impact investor with more than a couple of hundred investments in health wellness & consciousness (HWC), regenerative agriculture, healthy food, media, education, Web3, community, and deep tech ventures.

[7][8] Collaborating with renowned figures such as Dan Barber, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, Michael Moss, and Michel Nischan, he founded Food-X in 2014, a startup accelerator that supported businesses with a positive impact on the food sector, running 11 cohorts until it ceased operations in 2020.

In 2015, Shen also founded and served as the managing partner of FoodFutureCo, another business accelerator and impact investment firm which focuses on scale-up stage food, agriculture, social, and environmental entrepreneurship; followed by TheFutureCo (TFC) which expand into Web3 in 2021, and HWC in 2023.

In 2021, Shen became the advisor and mentor of the Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis for Axie Infinity, a Pokémon-inspired non-fungible token-based online video game where anyone can earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem.

He was able to walk undisguised through police and security officials in the Beijing airport, possibly indicating broader support for the student democracy movement than the Chinese government contended at the time.

[18] Shortly after his arrival in the United States, Shen held a press conference at the Walker Center for Ecumenical Exchange in Newton, Massachusetts, giving the first detailed eye-witness account by a student leader of the Tiananmen Square massacre and of the events that led up to it.

[25] The documentary is a 2-hour show special about 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, "uncover[ing] the true story of the seven-week period that changed China forever".

[30] Believing in the power of a decentralized movement to combat the social and economic injustices that contribute to a dysfunctional democracy, he held planning meetings with protesters in his Broadway office.

Shen also founded a higher education and culture-focused NGO in the mid-1990s: a center in Budapest for liberal scholars, journalists, writers, and educators studying transitional society with funding from Open Society Institute and Central European University of George Soros, as well as a literature review magazine with Chinese dissident poets and writers with support from Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, and Elie Wiesel.

[citation needed] Shen’s work has been profiled by major media around the world in several languages by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC, CNN, BBC, CBS, NHK, TVB, The Guardian, Le Monde, Fortune, among others.

He carried on a diverse writing career with political commentary, scholarly essays, film critics, literary prose, and movie scripts in English and in Chinese,[40] including publications in China under the pseudonym Rong Di.