He joined the military expedition force in northeastern China, then began working for Masses Daily (大众日报), the party mouthpiece in Shandong province, as a reporter, then he became lead editor.
In 1943, he became the editor-in-chief of the CCP revolutionary agitation periodical Struggle (斗争生活), then he authored a book Sunny Skies under the pseudonym Wang Li, under which he became known.
From 9 to 14 July, he was a member of the Chinese delegation led by Mao Dun to the World Peace Congress held in Moscow, Soviet Union, where he had conversations with Yuri Andropov.
Carrying orders from Zhou Enlai that were tacitly approved by Mao, Wang publicly threw his support behind the "Worker's Headquarters", which alienated the other major faction - the "Million Heroes".
[citation needed] On August 7, 1967, Wang Li visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and called for the ascendant rebels there to bravely attack incumbent power figures.
This led to the burning of the British mission in Beijing and paved the way for open criticism of Minister of Foreign Affairs Chen Yi and a mass mobilization of rebels who took over day-to-day functions of the ministry.
[2] Shortly thereafter, Mao declared, "Wang Li, Guan Feng and Qi Benyu are bad people, they are cockroaches, they must be arrested immediately."
Mao, Jiang Qing, and other leftist radicals feared that the Wuhan situation would turn PLA units in other cities against them, so decided to take pre-emptive action to appease more moderate interests in the military and in the party at large.
Having never publicly revealed his own involvement in the Wuhan standoff or the struggles at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao found a convenient scapegoat in Wang Li to take the fall for the more "extreme" aspects of the Cultural Revolution.
[2] Wang wrote a set of detailed memoirs about his involvement in the Cultural Revolution - a work that has emerged as a key primary source in the study of the time period.