Biography
Wang was born in a village outside of Changchun. He took part in the Korean War in the early 1950s. After the war, he was sent to Shanghai to work in a factory as the head of security guards, where he met Zhang Chunqiao and became involved in a Red Guards group. He organized the Shanghai Commune in January 1967, and in 1969, he was elevated to the CCP Politburo and in 1973, to Vice Chairman and third rank, behind Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in the Central Committee Politburo Standing Committee.
Wang was rumored to be slated to become Premier after then-Premier Zhou Enlai's death. However, Hua Guofeng was chosen to succeed Premier Zhou in January 1976. Wang was an important player during and after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, and was the announcer for his funeral service on national radio on September 18, 1976. He was arrested for his participation in the Gang of Four in October 1976, tried, and received life imprisonment. He died of liver cancer in a Beijing hospital on August 3, 1992.
Read more about this topic: Wang Hongwen
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)