Wand then joined the English Department (later Foreign Languages College) of Tianjin Normal University.

[1] In the early 1980s, when in his fifties, Wang started his interest in theoretical linguistics and particularly generative phonology.

In the following 20 years, he devoted himself to the introduction of phonological theories in Mainland China.

[2] He served as the editor of many major linguistics journals in Mainland China and he co-edited with Norval Smith the book Studies in Chinese Phonology (Mouton de Gruyter 1997).

At the time of his death, he was near the completion of his project on the analysis of neutral tones across Chinese dialects (National Social Science Foundation of China).