Wan Runnan

Chinese businessman and activist

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)

This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.
Find sources: "Wan Runnan" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

|

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.
Find sources: "Wan Runnan" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

|

(Learn how and when to remove this message)

Wan Runnan  (Chinese: 万润南; pinyin: wàn rùnnán; born 29 October 1946 in Yixing, Jiangsu) is a software engineer, entrepreneur and a Chinese human rights activist who is known for his involvement in the Chinese democracy movement.[1]

## Life

[edit]

Wan was in college studying engineering when he had his first taste of repression. With the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution sweeping the country, Wan was forced to interrupt his studies by the authorities and sent, without reason, to labor as a railway worker in the countryside. He eventually graduated (1970) from Tsinghua University and went on to a position with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

四通打字机 MS-2403

In 1984 he started Stone Emerging Industries Company, which produces computer software and English-Chinese word processors. The Chinese typewriter was ultimately eclipsed and made redundant with the introduction of computerised word processing, pioneered by engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners when they formed Stone Emerging Industries Company (Chinese: 四通新型产业公司; pinyin: Sìtōng xīnxíng chányè gōngsī) in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley".[2] Stone developed software based on Alps Electric custom made 8088 based hardware with a Brother Industries dot matrix printer, distributed by Mitsui, to print Chinese characters and released the system as the MS-2400.

When the pro-democracy protests began in the spring of 1989, Wan provided material support for the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and helped organize negotiations between the students and government. He became convinced that the Communists would crack down if the square wasn’t evacuated, but his warnings to the students went unheeded and the massacre soon followed. Wan decided to flee after the June 4 crack down and is now wanted by the Chinese authorities.

A month after the massacre Wan Runnan, along with prominent exiles such as Liu Binyan, Wuer Kaixi and Yan Jiaqi, met in Paris to call for the creation of the Federation for a Democratic China (FDC). He was the President of the FDC and lived in France during the FDC's initial stages and later moved to the United States. Wan Runnan currently lives in Paris.

Runnan 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.[3]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ 万润南：六四事件后我与胡锦涛分道扬镳(Chinese language)
2. ^ Kennedy, Scott (1997). "The Stone Group: State Client of Market Pathbreaker?". The China Quarterly. 152 (December 1997). Cambridge University Press: 752–756\. doi:10.1017/S0305741000047548. JSTOR 655558. S2CID 154841745.
3. ^ DeFore, John (2022-01-22). "'The Exiles': Film Review | Sundance 2022". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2022-05-11.

## External links

[edit]

* 獨立中文筆會萬潤南專頁(Chinese language)

Authority control databases

International|

* VIAF

Other|

* IdRef