Wang Hongwen played a pivotal Role in giving the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution its Cutting Edge
Wang Hongwen was born in December 1935 into a poor peasant household in a village near Changchun, then under Japanese occupation in Manchukuo. (Manchukuo was a Japanese puppet state established in 1932 in Manchuria, the northeastern region of China) This year we commemorate his 90th birth anniversary year. 34 years ago, Wang Hongwen, died on 3 August 1992.
Wang Hongwen was the youngest member of the ’Gang of Four’. Born into a poor peasant family in Changchun, Liaoning Province, he joined the People’s Liberation Army when he was still a boy.
During 1966, Wang played a pivotal role in recruiting and organising Red Guards in Shanghai. In January 1967, Wang and his followers formed the People’s Commune, which demanded the removal of CCP leadership in Shanghai and their replacement with Red Guards. 34 years ago, Wang Hongwen, died on 3 August 1992.
Wang Hongwen came the fore in the backdrop of war and foreign domination, and his generation's formative experience underscored the struggle to build an independent, socialist China out of a society ravaged by decades of imperialist encroachment, civil war and feudal exploitation. He enlisted in the People's Volunteer Army (The People's Volunteer Army was the name given to Chinese military forces sent to fight in the Korean War, framed as "volunteers" rather than a formal PLA deployment to avoid a formal state of war with the United States) and fought in the Korean War against the forces of American imperialism, joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1953, and was posted to Shanghai, where he became a security cadre at a state cotton mill. That a man of his origins could rise to national leadership within two decades symbolised the transformative potential and avenues the revolution had opened for China's rural and working poor, possibilities that would have been unimaginable under the Guomindang or under any capitalist social order.
By the mid-1960s, Mao and his closest allies diagnosed that the party and state apparatus, even under socialism were infected with the danger of producing a new privileged stratum, cadres who ruled in the name of the working class while steadily distancing themselves from it. The Soviet experience, was a testament that formal state ownership of the means of production did not automatically assure the place of political power in proletarian hands. The Cultural Revolution was launched as an attempt to dismantle this tendency by mobilising workers, students and peasants to criticise and, where necessary, remove entrenched officials directly, rather than relying solely on internal party authority.
Wang Hongwen became one of the most prominent protagonists of this project in Shanghai. During 1966, Wang played a pivotal role in recruiting and organising Red Guards in Shanghai. In January 1967, Wang and his followers formed the People’s Commune, which demanded the removal of CCP leadership in Shanghai and their replacement with Red Guards.
In January 1967, he orchestrated the seizure of municipal power by rebel worker organisations, an episode consciously named the Shanghai Commune after the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx's own model for proletarian self-rule. For a period, Shanghai was governed not by an appointed bureaucracy but by committees drawn from the factory floor. This experiment aligned with Mao’s subsequent promotion of revolutionary committees nationwide, a structure intended to fuse party cadres, army representatives and mass organisations into a more compact and answerable form of governance. It marked one of the major turning pints in steering the course of the Cultural Revolution, literally infusing a new life into it.
The trajectory that followed was extraordinary. Wang entered the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 1969 and became Vice-Chairman of the party in 1973, placing him third in the formal hierarchy while still in his late thirties, the fastest transition of any figure of proletarian origin in the history of the People's Republic of China. Alongside Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, he became associated with the task to keep the Cultural Revolution's wave alive combating a resurgent tendency within the party to restore material incentives, managerial authority and technocratic hierarchy, tendencies associated with Deng Xiaoping and the veteran cadres around Zhou Enlai.
The mobilisation of rebel worker militias in Shanghai, of which Wang was a principal organiser, involved armed confrontations with rival factions that left large numbers of people beaten, detained or killed, and the campaign against the April Fifth Movement in Tiananmen Square in 1976 involved the forcible suppression of a mourning demonstration for Zhou Enlai. These were genuine excesses, but they also cannot be understood in isolation from a leadership succession crisis unfolding in real time as Mao's health failed, competing visions of China's socialist future in direct contest with one another, and a mass movement that, once unleashed, proved far harder to discipline or reverse than its architects had anticipated.
The setback of the Cultural Revolution, from a Marxist standpoint, is not that its stated aims, combating bureaucratic degeneration, deepening mass participation in governance, were flawed but that the methods used to pursue them, like factional mobilisation, denunciation campaigns, the suspension of legal norms, eroded the mass line and undermined the very working-class institutions it hoped to strengthen.
Following Mao's death in September 1976, Wang served as master of ceremonies at the state funeral before being arrested weeks later in the coup organised by Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying. He was tried in 1980 and 1981, sentenced to life imprisonment, and eventually released on medical parole, dying of liver cancer in Beijing on 3 August 1992, aged 56.
Wang Hongwen's life encompasses the Cultural genuine attempt to place power in the hands of workers and to dismantle bureaucratic ossification, carried out through methods that, were imperative given the intensity of the political struggle.His political journey was characterised by acute foresight and rock like tenacity to overcome the most adverse barriers.
Harsh Thakor is a freelance Journalist Thanks sources of Socialist and Progressive World for Informati
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