Wan Runnan

Wan Runnan (Chinese: 万润南; pinyin: wàn rùnnán; 29 October 1946 – 13 October 2025) was a Chinese software engineer, businessman and human rights activist who was known for his involvement in the Chinese democracy movement.^[1]

Life and career

Wan was born in Yixing, Jiangsu on 29 October 1946. He 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 crackdown and was wanted by the Chinese authorities for his entire life.

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 lived in Paris.

Wan 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]

Wan died on 13 October 2025, at the age of 78.^[4]