Background
Wang Min was born Chen Shaoyu in Jinzhai County, Anhui province.
Wang Min was born Chen Shaoyu in Jinzhai County, Anhui province.
Wang Ming was active in student politics in Wuchang in the early 1920s. He joined the CCP in 1925. In November he studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, and represented the Hubei party branch in attendance on campus. He mastered Russian and became a protege of Pavel Mif, the university rector who groomed him to become a leader among the Chinese students. By April 1929, when Wang returned to Shanghai to participate in Communist propaganda, he and his associates dominated the university’s party branch bureau and created what their enemies dubbed a ltWang Ming dogmatic faction" within the university. In China, with the backing of Mif, Wang rose rapidly in the CCP hierarchy.
After the fall of Li Lisan in 1930, Wang and the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks a group of returned students from the Soviet Union were able to control the CCP Central Committee. In January 1931, Wang was elected a Central Committee and Politburo member at the Fourth Plenum of the Sixth CCP Central Committee. During the period of the third line" (January 1931-January 1935), the Chinese Bolsheviks dominated the CCP policy-making and eclipsed the power of Chairman Mao Zedong of the Jiangxi Soviet. In November 1931, Wang Ming returned to Moscow to serve as the CCP representative to the Comintern. At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, he was elected a member of its executive committee.
Before the Xi'an Incident of 1936, Wang promoted the United Front with the Guomindang (GMD). Loyally following the Comintern line, he was willing to cooperate with Jiang Jieshi. In November 1937, Wang returned to China, served as secretary of the CCP Changjiang Bureau, and helped the GMD to mobilize the masses to defend Wuhan. But the city fell into Japanese hands, and other CCP leaders did not support Wang’s “rightist” idea of merging CCP and GMD troops in a United Front. At the Sixth Plenum of the Sixth CCP Central Committee in Yan’an from September-November 1938, Wang was criticized for his '"rightist capitulationismw toward the GMD, and the Changjiang Bureau was abolished. Wang nevertheless was allowed to serve as director of the CCP^ United Front Work Department and stay with the Communist delegation in GMD Chongqing.
Wang Ming’s power within the CCP declined after Mao’s rectification movement of 1942-1944, and plummeted further after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Although he was able to retain his Central Committee membership at the Seventh and Eighth CCP congresses, his influence was gone. In January 1956, Wang left for the Soviet Union and began to publish anti-Mao writings until his death in 1974.
Wang Ming’s political support mainly stemmed from Mif,Stalin,and the Comintern. His concrete revolutionary activity within China was minor as compared with Mao's. Wang's political ideas and action nonetheless influenced the Chinese Communist concept of urban revolution, the United Front policy with the GMD, and the issue of political factions within the CCP. Being the leading Chinese Communist representative to the Comintern during the 1930s, Wang was also influential in his portrayal of Chinese political realities to the Communist International. In the end however,Wang Ming and his Russian-returned associates were no match for Mao Zedong and his allies in pragmatic revolutionary activities and power seizure in the Communist revolution.