He is currently an emeritus professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

A critic of Western representative democracy, his particular research interests include the history of the Cultural Revolution, sortition, the welfare state, and the comparative politics of East Asia.

He taught at Yale University from 1990 to 2000 before moving to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he became a professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration.

[3] In 1993, Wang co-authored the "Wang Shaoguang Proposal" with economist Hu Angang, a public policy report that argued that the taxation reforms of Deng Xiaoping had weakened the Chinese state, and advocated fiscal centralisation in response.

[5][6] He is a critic of Western representative democracy, which he believes has failed and degenerated into "electocracy",[7] and more generally of the focus on competitive elections as part of political reform.