Wang was born into a rich landlord family in San-yuan hsien, a few miles north of Sian, the Shensi provincial capital. His father, Wang Pao-shan, was an intimate friend of the powerful Shensi warlord Yang Hu-ch'eng, an association that was to be beneficial to young Wang. He is also said to have known Yii Yu-jen, another native of San-yuan who was an important T'ung-meng hui and KMT leader.
Yii, a man of progressive ideas, was prominent in educational circles in Shensi from about 1918 to 1922 when Wang was in his teens. Wang graduated from a military academy in Loyang, Honan, and then studied in Japan from 1929 to 1930, after which he reportedly worked as a secretary to Yang Hu-ch’eng for a brief time. According to his former wife’s account, Wang was by this time a Communist Party member, having joined, presumably in secret, in 1925.
In 1931 Wang went to Germany where he studied sociology at the University of Berlin until 1935, and as a consequence of his training he is fluent in German and has a halting knowledge of English. He was active in Berlin as a leader of Chinese youths studying there and as a member of the Berlin branch of the Communist Third International, better known as the Comintern. During his years in Berlin he came to know a German girl, Anna von Kleist, an accomplished linguist whose name has frequently been associated with the Comintern. They were married while on a visit to London in 1935,3 and in the late thirties and early forties Mme. Wang was well known to Westerners in China in her capacity as a secretary to Mme. Sun Yat-sen.
Except for a time in mid-1945 when he was briefly in India with his wife engaging in Communist activities (the details of which are unknown), Wang remained with Chou En-lai as a top assistant throughout the war and postwar period, thereby becoming a member of Chou’s coterie, a group that includes such prominent foreign affairs specialists as Chang Han-fu, Ch’iao Kuan-hua, and Ch’en Chia-k’ang. Wang was in frequent contact with Westerners in Chungking, Nanking, and Shanghai, and particularly with Americans during the period of the Marshall Mission from the end of 1945 to early 1947. Finally, when the January 1946 cease-fire agreement worked out under the auspices of U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall collapsed, Wang was among those evacuated to Yenan in late February 1947.
Wang’s activities in the late forties are not documented in detail, but it is known that he was the deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Section of the CCP Central Committee. By no later than the summer of 1949 he was in Peking where he participated in various conferences to establish “mass” organizations under the Communist regime. Thus, in June he became a Preparatory Committee member of the China New Legal Research Society and in September a Standing Committee member of the China New Political Science Association’s Preparatory Committee. He was also a Preparatory Committee member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA) from July 1950 to October 1952 when he was named to the SSFA’s First Executive Board, holding this post until December 1954. Soon after the central government was inaugurated in October 1949, he was appointed director of the Foreign Ministry's Staff Office, the position that was to occupy most of his time over the next five years. The exact nature of his duties in this post are not known, but he apparently served as Foreign Minister Chou En-lai's administrative chief. He was frequently mentioned in the press in connection with visits to China by foreign dignitaries, as when Mongolian Premier Tseden- bal visited China in the fall of 1952, or when Indian Prime Minister Nehru was in China two years later. Concurrent with his Foreign Ministry responsibilities was Wang's Board membership of the Chinese Peopled Institute of Foreign Affairs from its formation in December 1949 to 1955 (see under Chang Hsi-jo, the president).
From April to July 1954 Wang was secretary- general of Chou En-lai's delegation to the Geneva Conference, which brought an end to fighting between the French and the Communist forces of Ho Chi-minh in Indochina. In October of the same year he was appointed an assistant-minister of Foreign Affairs (one rank below a vice-minister). He retained his Foreign Ministry Staff Office directorship, but then in January 1955 he was relieved of both posts and appointed ambassador to Poland, replacing Tseng Yung-ch’iian. Wang presented his credentials in Warsaw in March, remaining there for nine years, the longest continuous tour in a single country by any PRC ambassador. Less than two months after his arrival, he attended the first meeting of the Warsaw Pact as a member of Defense Minister P’eng Te-huai’s delegation. Because the PRC is not a member of the Pact, the Chinese attended as observers (see under P'eng Te-huai). In July 1955 Wang was a member of Ho Lung's delegation brought from China to attend the celebrations in Warsaw marking the 10th anniversary of the Polish People's Republic, and in March 1959 he attended the Third Congress of the Polish United Workers' (Communist) Party as a member of Chu Te's delegation.
In July 1955 Wang was named as China’s representative to the so-called ambassadorial- level talks between the United States and the PRC. Three months earlier, at the close of the Bandung Conference, Chou En-lai had announced Peking's willingness to undertake these talks, which were designed to settle outstanding issues between the United States and China. The negotiations began on August 1, 1955, in Geneva, with American Representative. Alexis Johnson commuting from his ambassadorial post in Prague, and Wang traveling from Warsaw. The talks began on a promising note when each side agreed to release the nationals of the other side held in its country. (Most of the Americans in China were being held in prison, but the Chinese in the United States were merely forbidden to leave the country.) Although both sides had agreed to hold their talks in private, it soon became apparent that little progress was being made on other issues principally the problem of the status of Taiwan, a question on which both nations remained adamant.
The Wangs left Berlin for China in February 1936, stopping over in Moscow where, according to American journalist Edgar Snow, Wang Ping-nan conferred with Ch'en Shao-yii, the CCP representative to the Comintern, about the political situation in northwest China. Wang agreed that he would attempt to persuade Yang Hu-ch’eng, then the Nationalists’ “pacification commissioner” of the northwest, to join the united front that had been basic Comintern policy since 1935. Wang arrived in Peking in March 1936 and quickly went to Sian to contact Yang. He apparently succeeded in his assignment with little difficulty, probably because Yang, though nominally subordinate to Chiang Kai-shek, had little interest in implementing Chiang’s orders to crush Mao Tse-tung’s Communists in north Shensi, preferring to cooperate with the Red forces to resist Japanese encroachments in north China. Under the previous arrangements made in Moscow with Ch’en Shao-yli, Wang notified Ch^n of the success of his talks with Yang Hu- ch'eng. A Comintern agent was then supposed to have contacted Yang, but when Ch'en Shao- yii failed to respond to the repeated communications from Wang Ping-nan, Yang made his contacts directly with the Communists in north Shensi. Wang was probably taking orders from Teng Fa, a veteran of the Communist intelligence and underground network who was then working in Sian.
As an associate of Yang Hu-ch’eng’s, though under CCP direction, Wang was involved in the famous Sian Incident when Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped in December 1936 by Yang Hu- ch’eng and warlord Chang Hsueh-liang (see under Chou En-lai). Not long after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in mid-1937, Wang was sent to Chungking, and because his CCP membership was still not publicly known, he was able to hold minor posts in the KMT and to serve (in 1939) as a secretary of the People’s Foreign Relations Association, an organization initially formed in Hankow in 1938, which engaged in foreign policy research and published materials in both Chinese and English. He also served as a liaison man for the Communists’ Eighth Route Army and by 1942, his Party membership now made public, he became a secretary and spokesman for Chou En-lai, the Communists’ senior representative in Chungking during the war years.
Apart from his role in the Sino-American talks, Wang was also one of Peking's senior diplomats in Europe during a period that witnessed historic events and saw the evolution of Eastern Europe away from the total Soviet domination of the early fifties. Poland was particularly restive in the mid-fifties, especially in the fall of 1956 during the Hungarian Rebellion, and it is generally believed that the PRC supported the East Europeans in their desires to lessen their subordination to Moscow. It is not konwn what role Wang may have played in these events, but he did participate in talks with top Polish leaders in January 1957, when Chou En-lai visited Warsaw, seemingly as a mediator between the Poles and the Russians. Like all diplomats, much of Wang's time was devoted to the negotiation of trade and other agreements, as well as to protocol functions, such as hosting banquets marking China's National Day. He also used his visits to Geneva for the Sino-American talks to contact other diplomats, as in the early fall of 1955 when he held informal talks with Italian officials regarding increased Sino-Italian trade and the possibility of establishing formal diplomatic relations.
Wang is said to have bourgeois tastes, particularly enjoying good food and drink. One Western diplomat in Peking during the early fifties gained the impression that Wang was pleased that his assignment to Warsaw would take him away from the drabness of life in Peking. Wang divorced his German wife in the late forties and has since married a Chinese woman who has borne him two children. He is frequently confused with a Chinese of the same name, a man who graduated from Tsinghua University in 1927 and who received a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933. This Wang, an economist, is a specialist in transportation problems and has been a member of the Maritime Arbitration Commission since January 1959 (see under Sun Ta-kuang).
