After finishing high school at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Wang was sent to the countryside to serve as a sent-down youth worker in Inner Mongolia.

[4] In 1978, two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Wang was admitted into the International Politics program at Peking University, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

[1] He was Global Scholar at Princeton University from 2011 to 2015, including 9 months at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

"[7]: 62 According to Alex Joske, Wang has been "closely associated with China's Ministry of State Security for decades", joining undercover MSS officers, including then-head of the MSS United States operations bureau Lin Di and a spy previously declared persona non grata for falsely posing as a journalist, on trips to Japan and the US.

He also served as an early member of the China International Culture Exchange Center, a front run by the MSS' 12th Bureau.

[7]: 60  As of at least 2024, Wang's advice to Chinese policymakers is that they should avoid confrontation with the United States, manage the bilateral relationship carefully, and expand its international activities into less contentious areas.