Background
Wang Hongwen was bom in Changchun, Liaoning province.
Wang Hongwen was bom in Changchun, Liaoning province.
Wang Hongwen began his political career when he joined both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese People’s Volunteers in October 1950, during the Korean War.
After the war, in 1956, Wang became a worker at the No. 17 National Cotton Mill in Shanghai, where he soon became a cadre in the security department and a workshop CCP Committee secretary.
At the outset of the Cultural Revolution in June 1966, in response to Mao Zedong’s May 16 bulletin which identified the targets of the Cultural Revolution, Wang wrote what Mao would later acclaim to be uthe first significant big-character poster of the Cultural Revolution —a denunciation of the CCP secretary at the No. 17 National Cotton Mill. He went on to attack CCP cadres in Shanghai municipality, such as Chen Pixian and Cao Diqiu. As the Maoist faction began to gain control at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee (CC) of the CCP in August 1966, Wang followed the pattern of “Cultural Revolution Groups” everywhere and expanded the attack on a wide spectrum of Shanghai CCP cadres branded as loyal to the Liu Shaoqi-Deng Xiaoping faction. In September he organized the Shanghai Workers’ Revolutionary Rebels’ General Headquarters (SWRRGH) which laid siege to the CCP offices in Shanghai. Rebuffed by the Shanghai CCP organization, the SWRRGH then sent a mass petition group to Beijing, with Wang as a leader. The delegation was detained at the Anting Railroad Station outside Shanghai. The CC of the CCP, sent Zhang Chunqiao, a leading member of the radical Central Cultural Revolution Group, to Shanghai to mediate. Zhang promptly recognized the SWRRGH as the “legitimate revolutionary rebellious faction” in Shanghai and as the backbone of the Cultural Revolution in central-south and south China. Wang thus became Zhang's protege and began to be recognized by the uppermost-echelon Maoists in Beijing as a major promoter of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai.
As the power struggle in Shanghai intensified in 1967, Wang led in organizing the Provisional Committee of the Shanghai Peopled Commune, which was subsequently reorganized as the Shanghai Cultural Revolutionary Committee, at which point Wang became its vice-chairman. Henceforth Wang emerged as a major proponent of Mao Zedong thought, writing various essays from 1967 to 1969 that were published in the Rettmin ribao (People's Daily) and the Dagongbao extolling Maoism and calling on the people to study Mao’s writings. In April 1969, Wang was elected to the Ninth CC of the CCP. In January 1971 as the “rebellious phase” of the Cultural Revolution began to wind down and as Cultural Revolution groups around the country began to shed the label of “Cultural Revolutionary Committees” and turned,instead,to consolidate and institutionalize their political gains in a reversion to the more “normal” CCP Party Committee and secretariat structure, Wang became the No. 3 CCP Committee secretary of Shanghai municipality, with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan as the first secretary and No. 2 secretary, respectively. However, since both Zhang and Yao remained in Beijing, Wang was virtually the active head of the CCP organization in Shanghai. In July 1972, he added to his titles the position of political commissar of the Shanghai garrison of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
In late-1971, in the aftermath of the Lin Biao affair, the coalition of Cultural Revolution radicals at the top of the CCP structure in Beijing became depleted. Of the original members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group,only Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife), Kang Sheng, Xie Fuzhi, Yao Wenyuan, and Zhang Chunqiao were left, with Kang and Xie both in ill health. Meanwhile the question of succession to Mao Zedong loomed. Lin Biao once called “Mao’s best disciple” and tagged as Mao’s most likely successor, had betrayed Mao and, fleeing from China, had died on September 13, 1971, in an airplane accident. The question of who would next emerge among the various factions as Mao's successor became a burning issue in early 1972. Among the remaining radicals, whose ideological positions remained closest to Mao's own, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao wielded the greatest influence but they were unlikely to be acceptable to the other factions and especially to the military.
The abruptness of his rise to these positions was clear evidence that Mao himself was quite possibly intent on grooming Wang for the succession. As a young man (he was 38) and with his background as a worker, Wang would have brought the qualities of youth and “proletarian” credentials to rejuvenate the radical faction which had been seriously tainted by the be-trayal of Lin Biao. Although he was unquestionably a “Cultural Revolu-tionist” he was from the periphery, not the tarnished Beijing center of Cultural Revolution politics. Perhaps Mao also saw Wang as a potential counterpoint to the increasingly ambitious leaders of the radical faction, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao.
At the Tenth CCP Congress, Wang, together with Zhang and Yao Wen-yuan, was given the task of preparing three major documents, the political report, the draft of a new Party constitution, and a report that explained and justified the revision of the Party constitution (the last of which Wang was chosen to read to the Congress) which spelled out the still-radical Maoist ideological positions that had been articulated at the height of the Cultural Revolution at the Ninth Congress in 1969. These documents helped to consolidate Wang's position among the radicals.
Whatever Mao may have expected of him, Wang proved unable to emerge independent, out of the shadows of his seniors in the radical faction that would soon come to be known as the Gang of Four (si ren bang), a term that Mao himself would use, for the first time, at a Politburo meeting in July 1974 to describe this cabal. Wang's long-time association with Zhang Chunqiao, and perhaps his own lack of political experience and his far-too-abrupt rise to fiigh position without any independent power or political base, rendered him a pawn to his radical colleagues. In 1974, Wang collaborated much as a junior partner with Jiang Qing in formulating die “Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius” campaign which while ostensibly aimed at weeding out Lin Biao’s supporters was in fact a scarcely veiled attack on Zhou Enlai, the premier and the remaining bastion of moderation among the revolutionary old guard of Mao's own generation.
Wang Hongwen was formally removed from Party membership and from all his positions in July 1977, and was sent to a state farm in Inner Mongolia for correction through labor in November 1978. In October 1979 he was put in prison, and a year later put on public trial, at the end of which (in 1981) he was given life-imprisonment and stripped of his political rights for life. On August 3, 1992, Wang died in prison of a liver ailment.
Standing Committee of Politburo, CCP 1973-1976. Of “gang of four” Oct 1976.
Wang Hongwen's political leadership in what is probably the most turbulent half-decade in post-1949 Chinese politics was at best ephemeral. Wang’s being handpicked by Mao to rise abruptly to exceptionally high office borders on the totally inexplicable and was clearly the result of exaggerated expectations of what would turn out to be an empty vessel. Wang simply did not have the skills, experience, or even basic political acumen to provide leadership for such a political system as China. Even in calmer times his flaws would probably have failed him, but under the harsh light of such a treacherous period as 1973-1976, Wang Hongwen was revealed, in the end, as being little more than a shadow.