Background
Wang was born about 1908 in Lo-ch'uan hsien, located 50 miles south of Yenan in Shensi.
Wang was born about 1908 in Lo-ch'uan hsien, located 50 miles south of Yenan in Shensi.
After graduating from the Number Six Middle School in Yenan he joined the Communist guerrillas in north Shensi. The guerrillas were organized in 1928 by Liu Chih- tan, a Whampoa graduate who returned to his native Shensi after the mid-1927 split between the Communists and Nationalists.
According to a 1957 Communist account, in 1932 Liu Chih-tan and Wang Shih-fai organized three guerrilla forces, known as the North Shensi, Kuan-chung, and Shensi-Kansu guerrillas. Guerrilla warfare was inaugurated, land reform was developed, soviet government authority was established, and the Shensi-Kansu Border Soviet District was formed this account, postdating the 1955 purge of Kao Kang, artificially inflates Wang's role in these activities. Although Wang was in fact an important participant in these events, Kao Kang was then clearly next in importance to Liu Chih-tan. In the ensuing years, Liu, Kao Kang, and Wang developed their forces into two units, known as the 26th and 27th Armies. In July 1933 Wang was in command of the crack Second Regiment of the 26th Red Army's 42nd Division when it was decimated by a superior KMT force at Wei-hua near Sian. As a consequence of this defeat the center of guerrilla activity moved north closer to Pao-an. Wang Shih- t'ai led his surviving troops there in late 1933. In June 1934 some of the guerrilla forces were reorganized and the North Shensi Revolutionary Area centered in An-ting was established. Wang became a regimental commander of the new force.
In the meantime, Wang had been elected a member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the Chinese Soviet Republic. the Second All-China Congress of Soviets held in Juichin, the capital of the republic in Kiangsi. The CEC was presided over by Mao Tse-tung. Wang’s election, almost certainly in absentia, was rather unusual in that there is no evidence that more senior Shensi leaders like Liu Chih-tan and Kao Kang were also elected. In any event, Wang's major contributions to the Communist movement continued to be in the northwest. He held a series of significant posts in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region, which was formed following the outbreak of the war with Japan in mid-1937. He is said to have been commander of the San- pien Military Sub-district, covering the northwestern section of the Shen-Kan-Ning region. Another report placed him as the garrison commander of the Kuan-chung Sub-district in the southern part of the region. By 1941 he had transferred to the Border Region capital at Yenan, where he served as the acting commander of the Shansi-Suiyuan-Shensi-Kansu- Ninghsia Joint Defense Headquarters. (By the 1942-43 period Ho Lung was commander of this headquarters.) Toward the end of the war Wang was the garrison commander and political commissar of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region. In 1946 he was in command of the Peace Preservation Headquarters (pao-an szu-ling-pu), presumably a redesignation of the previous commands he had held in Yenan.
Aside from his military duties Wang also held posts in the legislative and executive organs of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region Government. He was a deputy from Ch'ii-hsien in Kansu to the Second Assembly of the Border Region (1941-1946), attending the Assembly sessions held in Yenan in November 1941 and December 1944. In the Third Assembly (1946-1949) Wang was again named as a deputy, this time representing the military establishment. At the close of the initial session of the Third Assembly (April 1946), he was elected a member of the Shen-Kan-Ning Government Council, the executive branch under Chairman Lin Po-ch’U.
With the end of hostilities against Japan, the forces under Wang's command began to be absorbed into the main Communist armies, which were beginning to emerge in preparation for the conquest of the mainland. First identified as the commanding officer of the Third Column of P’eng Te-huai’s Northwest PLA, by 1947 Wang was transferred to command the Fourth Column of the Northwest PLA. These units were apparently integrated into P'ing First Field Army by early 1949 when field armies were created, Wang's forces were then called the Fourth Army and were subordinate to the First Field Army’s Second Corps. From 1949 to 1951 Wang was political commissar of the Second Corps, which was commanded by Hsu Kuang-ta. During 1949 the First Field Army conquered the northwest, including Yenan, the former Communist capital, ultimately expanding in the latter part of the year to conduct mopping up operations in Ninghsia, Kansu, Tsinghai, and Sinkiang.
From late 1951 he was further identified as a member of the Northwest Party Bureau. Within the Kansu Provincial Government he was a vice-governor and initially (from March 1950) chairman of the government’s Finance and Economics Committee. However, he was demoted to the vice-chairmanship of this committee in July 1950, being replaced by Chang Te-sheng, a former colleague from the Shen-Kan-Ning Government.
Wang was not frequently reported in the press during the early 1950's; however, he did give “instructions” to the newly established Kansu Nationalities Affairs Committee in May 1950, and he was among those who attended the fourth meeting of the NWMAC in Sian in November 1951. During this same period, as already described, he retained his position in the military establishment as political commissar of the Second Corps under P’eng Te-huai’s First Field Army. In July 1951 he received a new post closely related to his military role when he was named as director and political commissar of the Northwest Railway Construction Bureau. The post was an important one, for the development of railways in the northwest has been a major concern of the Communist government. Wang remained in this post for 13 months, gaining experience for the vice-ministership in the Ministry of Railways, which he assumed in Peking in August 1952. In this ministry he served under T'eng Tai-yuan, a long-time colleague of P'eng Te-huai. He remained in the post until the constitutional government was inaugurated at the first session of the First NPC in September 1954. At this time Wang, a deputy from Kiangsu to the NPC, was made a member of the military advisory organ, the National Defense Council, a post he still retains. With the reorganization of the central government at this same time, Wang transferred (October 1954) from the Railway Ministry to a comparable position as a vice-chairman of the newly established State Construction Commission, serving here' under Po I-po, one of China’s top economic specialists.
For the next three and a half years Wang's activities centered around the Construction Commission. In November 1954 he was deputy head of a construction engineering delegation that toured the USSR. Immediately after his return home he served as deputy to Lii Cheng- ts’ao in negotiations that led to the signing on December 24, 1954, of agreements and protocols to assist North Vietnam in the restoration of its communication facilities. In October 1955 Wang was again in the USSR as head of another construction engineering delegation. Two years later, in October 1957, he went to Wuhan to officially “accept” for the central government the famed Yangtze River Bridge, which provided a rail link across the Yangtze (joining the Peking-Hankow and the Hankow-Canton Railways). In the meantime, at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, his long Party career received official recognition when he was elected as an alternate member of the Central Committee.
In February 1958, during a partial government reorganization, Wang’s State Construction Commission was abolished, and its functions were taken over by the State Planning Commission, the State Economic Commission, and the Ministry of Building. Nothing was heard about Wang for over a year, but then it was revealed that he had been transferred back to his native northwest. In April 1959 he was identified in Lanchow, Kansu, as a vice-chairman of the “Northwest Economic Coordinating Region,” a unit possibly under the control of one of the major commissions in Peking (such as the State Planning Commission). Another lengthy period passed before Wang was again identified (August 1961)，this time as a secretary of the Kansu Party Committee. This new position, which Wang still retains, was assumed at approximately the same time that Wang Feng became the Party first secretary in Kansu, replacing Chang Chung-liang, who was presumably removed for political reasons.
Just prior to the final military thrusts into the northwest in late 1949, Wang returned to Peking briefly to take part (as a representative of the First Field Army) in the meetings of the CPPCC, the organization that brought the PRC into existence on October 1, 1949. During these sessions, held in late September, he served on the ad hoc committee that drafted the Organic Law of the Central People’s Government, one of the principal documents adopted then. Wang did not receive any appointments in the central government but was immediately sent back to the northwest. There he assumed several posts in the Kansu Provincial People’s Government (formally established in January 1950), as well as in the regional government with jurisdiction over Kansu, the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC). The NWMAC was headed by Wang's long-time military superior, P'eng Te-huai. Wang was a member of the NWMAC from its formation in January 1950, serving also from March 1950 as a member of its Finance and Economics Committee.
