Wang was the head of the Chinese Section at Library of Congress and worked in the field of librarianship for forty-eight years before retiring from LC in October 2004.
[2] In 1949, Wang left China to study in the United States, where he received high school, college, and graduate education.
In 1958, he became a cataloguer in the newly established Far Eastern Languages Section where he was asked to head up an innovative project to use a photocomposing machine that the Library just purchased from Japan to produce catalog cards with CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) scripts, which put the practice of hand-copying CJK characters to cards to an end: quite a technological breakthrough at the time.
In that position, he helped the Library to develop a core collection of science and technology in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.
Wang also compiled three bibliographies in the 1960s: 1) Chinese Scientific and Technical Serial Publications in the Collections of the Library of Congress, 2) Mainland China Organizations of Higher Learning in Science and Technology and their Publication: a Selected Guide, and 3) Nuclear Science in Mainland China.
Wu, a Chinese studies scholar/librarian, to strengthen contacts with vendors and exchange partners in Hong Kong and Taiwan to develop the library's collection on modern China.
In 1969, after seven years of attending evening classes, he earned his doctoral degree in East Asian History from Georgetown University with minors in American Diplomacy and Soviet Foreign Policy.
Wang chaired the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) Chinese Materials Committee from 1989 to 1995, and served on the ALA International Relations Roundtable.
From February 25 to March 20 of 2013, several dozen Chinese scrolls owned by Wang were displayed at the George Mason University Art Gallery.