In January 1984 he was sent to work for the autonomous region's party organization in Yinchuan, where he climbed through the ranks with a series of administrative and research positions.

Wang made a name for himself as a resident expert in the economy of predominantly Islamic states, conducting extensive research on Middle Eastern countries.

[2] In September 2000, Wang was admitted into the Ethnic Affairs Institute of the Minzu University of China where he earned a doctorate studying the economic structure of Muslim countries.

The Financial Times reported, in February 2019, that Wang had plagiarised 17 paragraphs from a prior academic work in his doctoral thesis presented in 2003 to the university.

[citation needed] In 2022, as part of Xi Jinping’s ethnic assimilation policy, the Chinese Communist Party authorized a corruption inquiry into Wang Zhengwei.