Wan Runnan

Wan Runnan (; 29 October 1946 – 13 October 2025) was a Chinese software engineer, businessman, and human rights activist. Wan founded , the first private computer company in China. He was known for his support for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which he financed heavily.

Life and career Wan was born in Yixing, Jiangsu on 29 October 1946. He studied construction engineering at Tsinghua University in the 1960s. There, he married his classmate Liu Tao, daughter of President Liu Shaoqi. In 1970, Wan divorced Liu and was sent to work in the countryside amidst the Cultural Revolution. There, he worked on the railroads and taught middle school. He also met his second wife, Li Yu. Li was the daughter of Li Chang, who likely helped Wan get a job in the Computer Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1976.

On 16 May 1984, Wan and his partners founded Stone Emerging Industries Company in Haidian, Beijing. The company was legally registered as a collective, the only way for a private company to have more than seven employees before 1988. Wan would serve as president of the company until June 1989.

In 2014, Wan was interviewed by the Financial Times. The interview generated a response in the Chinese state-run Global Times, written by its editor Hu Xijin. The column was noted as a rare mention of the Tiananmen Square incident in a state-run newspaper.

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.

Wan died from heart disease in Créteil, near Paris, on 13 October 2025, at the age of 78. Though he had wished to become a naturalized French citizen to "have the opportunity to vote for a leader once in his life", the process was not completed before his death.