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SOLDIERS of the People’s Liberation Army are occupying the offices of
China’s most successful independent computer company, the Beijing Stone
Group. Wan Runnan, the software engineer who founded the company, is in
hiding and officials have issued a warrant for his arrest as the government
continues to crack down on supporters of democracy.

The authorities have pinpointed Stone as a symbol of the ‘counter-revolution’.
The company, founded five years ago, rapidly became the vanguard of China’s
computer industry and, in its management style, established itself as a
model for economic reform (This Week, 17 June).

Stone owed its success and its downfall to the prominent position it
played in China’s reform and to the associations it had forged with prominent
politicians. Wan had been a confidant of Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general
secretary of the Communist Party, and his supporters. But with Zhao’s fall
from grace, Stone lost its influential protector.

Wan and the other senior figures in the company had lobbied loudly for
further reforms that they believed would invigorate the economy. The reformers
saw political change as an essential prelude to economic progress. Stone
set up a unit for political research that became one of Zhao’s think-tanks.
When the student movement emerged this spring, calling for greater democracy,
press freedom and an end to corruption, Wan was one of its first backers.
He also signed petitions demanding the release of political prisoners.

A leading dissident and writer who fled the country last week said that
Wan might have reached Hong Kong. The dissident, one of a group of writers
and intellectuals who regularly joined the students in Tiananmen Square
before the army moved in, expected that Stone would be taken over by the
state. So far, he said, other independent computer companies had escaped
lightly because they were not involved with the movement for democracy.

In the meantime, Liu Binyan, the former editor of the official newspaper,
the People’s Daily, said in Hong Kong that academics had suffered most from
the government’s crackdown. ‘All the famous scholars, all the scholars with
influence – if they are not in hiding, they have fled abroad,’ he said.
Liu lives in exile in the West after the Communist Party dismissed him in
1987 for spreading ‘Western bourgeois liberal ideas’.

According to official Chinese news agencies, the authorities have arrested
more than 2000 ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Wan is one of seven named intellectuals
whose arrest warrants were published in an offical circular last week. However,
Liu and other dissidents suspect that hundreds more intellectuals who signed
petitions in support of the student movement are on a government black list.

The major universities in the capital, Beijing University and the People’s
University, remain closed and the few students left on campus elsewhere
in the country are receiving lectures dominated by political education.
The state Education Commission has ordered all local governments to arrange
‘political ideological education’ to help students to ‘love socialism’ and
‘love the army’.

Most of the 80 000 Chinese students who are studying abroad will be
seeking ways to avoid returning. The US, which has about half the total,
has said that the students can stay for at least another year.