[1] John Wong received his U.S. civilian pilots' license in April 1932, traveling to China to join the Guangdong Provincial Air Force under General Chen Jitang, and was then sent to Germany along with other native Chinese and Chinese-American volunteer pilots by the Guangdong government, including Arthur Chin, for advanced aerial gunnery training with the Luftwaffe at Lagerlechfeld Air Base in southern Germany.

[2] By then, the provincial and warlord air forces have become absorbed into the central Chinese Air Force, and Wong was assigned to command the 17th Pursuit Squadron (PS) of the central government's 3rd Pursuit Group (PG) flying the Boeing P-26 Peashooter Model 281, stationed at Chuyung Airbase (Jurong Airbase) in defense of Nanjing following the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

[citation needed] Wong yet again engaged another large bombing raid on Chuyung the following day, 16 August 1937, scoring a triple-kill over the G3M raiders from the Kanoya Kokutai.

Huang Kuang-Han (English name Raymond Wong) on a strike against Japanese landing forces and naval assets at Wusongkou on northern shores of Shanghai metropolis; while on approach over the target area, John Wong's Peashooter pilots engaged the defending Japanese navy fighters while the Hawks went for the ground targets, and in the intense running dogfight, deputy commander Lt. John Huang Xinrui shot down a Nakajima A4N fighter near Chongming Island, however, Lt. Qin Jiazhu was killed in the melee.

On 3 December he returned to Nanjing to fly a reconnaissance mission on the Chinese air force's single Hawk 75, escaping two intercepting groups of Japanese fighters and gaining target information that was passed on to the newly arrived Soviet-crewed SB-2 bomber units.

During the air defense of Chengdu, Wong flew a captured Ki-27 monoplane fighter against Japanese bombers conducting night raids without success.