Controversy clings to Edward Zeng like white on rice. To his admirers, the 43-year-old founder and CEO of Beijing-based Sparkice is a visionary and a survivor. At 26, he went from a promising young cadre in the State Planning bureaucracy to an accidental Tiananmen Square refugee. Finding himself in Japan on that fateful day in June 1989, he took the opportunity to enroll in a Canadian graduate school, where he sold T-shirts door-to-door to pay the bills.

Red Herring reports that he returned to China in 1995 and emerged by 1999 as the high-flying poster boy for what was briefly one of China’s best-known IT companies, an earlier incarnation of Sparkice. Mr. Zeng, his proponents say, is simply a man with a gift for guanxi—Chinese backroom business relationships—and knows how to work the system to come out on top.