[3][4] His early life was one of extreme poverty and repeated illness; but he had an inquiring mind and did well at a London Missionary Society school.

[7] In 1919 Wang became a teacher at a Presbyterian mission school in Baoding, a hundred miles south of the capital, but was dismissed in 1920 when he insisted on being baptized by immersion.

[8] His mother and sister thought his behavior so peculiar that they believed him mentally ill, and Wang himself later admitted that the "persecution" he had received from others was in part the result of his own immaturity.

[9] In 1923, after a good deal of personal Bible study but no formal theological training,[10] Wang moved towards a more mature understanding of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith.

[12] Wang also had an itinerant ministry throughout China, visiting twenty-four of the twenty-eight provinces and taking the pulpit in churches of thirty different denominations.

In 1926, Wang began publishing a religious newspaper, Spiritual Food Quarterly (Chinese: 靈食季刊; pinyin: Líng shí jìkān).

A few months earlier Wang had written a long article attacking the Three-Self Committee headed by Y. T. Wu as a group composed of modernist unbelievers with whom true Christians should have nothing to do.

[21] After signing a confession, making a humiliating plea for mercy from those he had previously denounced as "false prophets," and promising to participate in the TSPM, Wang was released from prison.

"[18][24] After Wang's release he received numerous visitors to his tiny apartment in Shanghai, including foreigners from Europe, North America, and Asia.

[29] Wang recalled that after twenty years of instruction from his wife, he had made "a measure of progress," but he also warned readers of his autobiography that Jingwen "should not necessarily be taken as a model in this respect.

"[30] Wang's sermons also reflected changes in gender relations that occurred during the early Republican period, and he preached about marriage, concubinage, and the place of woman in the family.

"[36] An obsessively orderly man, Wang's advice included admonitions against spitting, flirting, brawling, and chewing on raw garlic.