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."
The leading figure of the "28 Bolsheviks" trained at Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University, he imported a Comintern-loyal dogmatic line and led the early CCP's Moscow-aligned leadership. He was Mao Zedong's strongest rival, targeted in Mao's essays "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" and purged in the 1942 Rectification Movement as the symbol of dogmatism.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
- 1927–1936From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long MarchHead of the “28 Bolsheviks”, representing the party in MoscowTook over the centre in 1931 and then represented the party at the Comintern.
- 1937–1945The war with Japan and the second united front“Everything through the united front”Returned at the end of 1937 urging cooperation with the Kuomintang, and became the target of rectification.
- 1956–1969The Sino-Soviet SplitMoscow-aligned critic of MaoAfter fleeing to the USSR in 1956, he denounced Mao's line through Chinese-language broadcasts and writings, lending his voice to the Soviet side of the polemic.
Anti-Mao Polemics in Exile
In 1956 Wang Ming left for Moscow, ostensibly for medical treatment before the Eighth National Congress, and never returned. During the deepening Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s and 1970s he wrote a stream of polemics denouncing Mao Zedong and the CCP from the standpoint of a Comintern-trained internationalist. He branded the Cultural Revolution a "counter-revolutionary coup" rather than a revolution, charging that Mao had substituted the "thoughts of Mao Tse-tung" for Marxism-Leninism and smashed the Party and its people. In "The 'Cultural Revolution' and the Maoist Bid for Cooperation with Imperialism," begun in the autumn of 1971, he analyzed Mao's anti-Soviet line as "nationalist in form and anti-communist in content," arguing that the break with the USSR served rapprochement with imperialism. These writings were collected in Mao's Betrayal, published by Moscow's Progress Publishers in 1979, and served Soviet polemicists as insider testimony against Mao. Having survived the Rectification Movement on the Central Committee and escaped the Cultural Revolution's persecution, Wang died in Moscow in 1974, leaving behind a rival narrative of CCP history in his memoirs and polemical works.