Leader of the "28 Bolsheviks" and Mao Zedong's foremost political rival
During the 1932 Shanghai Incident, Wang declared China faced "a struggle between two nations — the newborn Chinese Soviet Republic and the rotten Republic of China," calling this confrontation "the core of the total of the current Chinese political life."
A core leader of the "28 Bolsheviks" group in the early Chinese Communist Party, Wang Ming studied at Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University under Pavel Mif's patronage and served as CCP representative to the Comintern from 1931 to 1937. A doctrinaire Stalinist, he was Mao Zedong's primary political rival, and Mao directly targeted Wang's positions in his essays "On Practice" and "On Contradiction." At the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935, Wang helped shape the anti-Japanese united front line, but was purged during the 1942 Rectification Movement as the symbol of dogmatism, after which he went into exile in Moscow in 1956.
Career Timeline
- 1925–1929Studied at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University
- 1931.1Elected to CCP Politburo
- 1931–1937CCP representative to the Comintern
- 1935Elected to Comintern Presidium
- 1937–1938Secretary of the CCP Yangtze Bureau
- 1949–1956Director of the Central Legal Committee, PRC
- 1956–1974Exile in USSR; engaged in anti-Mao propaganda