Wan Runnan

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.

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".

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.

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).