After his death in exile in New York City, he was widely eulogized as one of the Chinese government's most significant social and political critics.
[1] After writing an article in which he mocked Chiang Kai-shek for allowing the Japanese to seize Manchuria,[2] he was arrested in May 1934, and sentenced to ten years in prison.
After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek declared a "united front" with the Communists against the Japanese, and Wang was released after serving only three and a half years of his sentence as part of a general amnesty.
[5] After arriving, Wang wrote one of the first biographical articles on Mao Zedong, and edited cultural journals intended to be circulated among peasants.
[8] After the purge, Wang was forced by Mao's lieutenant, Kang Sheng, to leave Yan'an and travel to Japanese-occupied Shandong as a low-level CCP agent, where he survived only "through the kindness of peasants".
These articles made him an early victim of the subsequent "Anti-Rightist Campaign", when those who had followed Mao's directions and spoken out were persecuted as "rightists".
[12] In 1980, he published an autobiographical novel, Hunger Trilogy, which included a semi-fictional account of his time in both Kuomintang and Communist political prisons.
[8] In December 1986, college students demonstrated in over a dozen Chinese cities in order to agitate for greater economic and political freedoms.
[14] Deng personally attacked Wang for being "wildly presumptuous", and accused him of five "major mistakes", including a belief that Chinese socialism was "feudal or semi-feudal in essence".
Because of his refusal, Hu was dismissed from his position as General Secretary in January 1987, effectively ending his period of influence within the Chinese government.
He was accused in the Chinese media of "listening to the Voice of America and spreading rumors based on its broadcasts, writing articles in support of the student hunger strike, giving counterrevolutionary speeches on Shanghai's People's Square... publishing articles in the Hong Kong press", and trying to "overthrow the Party's leadership" with his writing.
[2] In 1992, following pressure from the American government,[2] Wang was allowed to leave his home in Shanghai, in order to accept a temporary position as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, in New York City.
Hundreds of people visited his memorial service in New York, including the most significant Chinese exiles then living in the United States.
[5] Some of those present included Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, Yan Jiaqi, Harry Wu, Wei Jingsheng, Xiao Qiang, Wang Dan, Tang Baiqiao, Cao Changqing, Chen Pokong and Gao Zhan.