Wang Ruowang

Wang Ruowang (February 4, 1918 – December 19, 2001) was a Chinese author and dissident who was imprisoned various times for political reasons by both the Kuomintang and the Communist government of China for advocating reform and liberalization.

His name at birth was "Shouhua", but he was most commonly known by his pen name, "Ruowang".

He was a prolific essayist and literary critic.

He was imprisoned for four years in the same prison building that the Kuomintang had imprisoned him in during the 1930s, enduring conditions that he later described as "fascist brutality".

In 1932, when Wang was fifteen years old, he was expelled from school for taking part in a student demonstration.

He joined the Communist Youth League later that year.

In 1933 he moved to Shanghai, where he began work at a pharmaceutical factory while operating as a low-level Communist agent.

While working at this factory he founded a publication, Toilet Literature, a newspaper that was distributed by being pasted on the walls of the factory workers' bathroom area.

After writing an article in which he mocked Chiang Kai-shek for allowing the Japanese to seize Manchuria, he was arrested in May 1934, and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Wang was a member of the Chinese Communist Party from 1937 to 1957, when he was expelled for holding "rightist views".

After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek declared a "united front" with the Communists against the Japanese, and Wang was released after serving only three and a half years of his sentence as part of a general amnesty.

After Wang's release, in 1937, he joined the Communist Party of China and traveled to the Communist base in Yan'an.

After arriving, Wang wrote one of the first biographical articles on Mao Zedong, and edited cultural journals intended to be circulated among peasants.

He joined the Communist Party in order to "fight evil, autocracy and oppression", but was persecuted during the 1942 Yan'an Rectification Campaign for writing for a controversial wall newspaper, Light Cavalry, which was condemned by Party leaders for discussing dark and unsavory aspects of life in Yan'an.

One of his friends was killed during the purge.

After the purge, Wang was forced by Mao's lieutenant, Kang Sheng, to leave Yan'an and travel to Japanese-occupied Shandong as a low-level Communist agent, where he survived only "through the kindness of peasants".

Here, despite his endorsement of Luo Ronghuan, criticized the leadership of the Party, and was labeled the "Wang Shiwei of Shandong" and a secret agent, but was saved from this label and grave consequences by Luo.

After entering Japanese-occupied China, Wang was briefly imprisoned by the Japanese, but was released.

After the Japanese surrendered, in 1945, Wang was pardoned by Kang.

He returned to Shanghai, where he worked at the East China Bureau Propaganda Department.

He became a co-editor of a prominent local newspaper, and gained a reputation as an essayist and literary critic.

Some of the Communists imprisoned with Wang became successful officials after the Communist victory in 1949: one became the governor of Guangdong, and another became the deputy governor of Anhui.

In 1956, after Mao encouraged writers to criticize the Communist Party in the "Hundred Flowers Campaign", Wang published ten articles critical of the Communist Party.

These articles made him an early victim of the subsequent "Anti-Rightist Campaign", when those who had followed Mao's directions and spoken out were persecuted as "rightists".

After being identified as a "rightist", Wang was expelled from the Party, lost his job, and was forced to work at a forced labour camp in the countryside.

His wife, Li Ming, was also persecuted for her association with him.

After refusing to condemn him, she also lost her job and suffered a mental breakdown.

The Communist Party removed Wang's "rightist" label in 1962, but soon after Wang angered the Party again by publishing a story, "History of a Cauldron", in which he satirized the policies of the Great Leap Forward as cruel, impractical, and ironic.

This story led the local leader of the Communist Party, Ke Qingshi, to renew the Party's attacks on Wang and his family.

Before she died, in 1964, Wang's wife begged him to protect his family by never writing again.

Wang blamed the Communist Party for her death.

After the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Wang was persecuted as a "counterrevolutionary".

He rejoined the Communist Party 1979, but in 1987 he was again expelled by Deng Xiaoping for promoting "bourgeois liberalization".

After his death in exile in New York City, he was widely eulogized as one of the Chinese government's most significant social and political critics.

Wang remained a political outcast until 1979, following Deng Xiaoping's ascent to power, when Wang was allowed to rejoin the Communist Party as part of a national programme to rehabilitate those unjustly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

Following his political rehabilitation, he continued to criticize the government and agitated for greater human rights and democratic reforms.

Following Wang's rehabilitation, he was assigned to work as the deputy director of a Shanghai literary magazine.

He resumed his literary career, becoming a member of the councils of both the Shanghai Writers' Association and the Chinese Writers' Association.

In 1980 he published an autobiographical novel, Hunger Trilogy, which included a semi-fictional account of his time in both Kuomintang and Communist political prisons.

In the book, Wang recalled how the Communists' political prisons had been much more cruel than Kuomintang political prisons.