Wang Shiwei - Execution

Execution

By 1942, Wang was working for the Liberation Daily (解放日報) where he wrote the essay "Wild Lilies" (野百合花), criticizing Mao Zedong's taste for beautiful women, as well as what he called the unjustified privileges enjoyed by members of the Communist Party. It discussed the "ugliness and indifference" of Yan'an; also criticizing some "big men" in the CCP whom Wang thought were responsible for the "growth of darkness" in China.

The article caused him many woes. On 27 May 1942, the Central Committee held a seminar to discuss whether Wang was guilty. On 23 October, under the orders of Mao, Wang was expelled from the Communist Party on the charge that he was one of the "Five Member Anti-Party Gang" of Trotskyites (托派份子) who were alleged to have sought to take over the Chinese Communist Party, and that he was disrupting party unity.

Wang's defence was that he was not involved in any Trotskyist activities, except for helping his friends Wang Wen-yuan (王文元) and Chen Qing-chen (陳清晨) to translate two prose pieces in "Autobiography of Leon Trotsky" (《托洛茨基自傳》), activities which he had already informed the Party.

Wang's "trial," which took the form of a series of struggle sessions, ended in June 1942 with Wang being found guilty and put under arrest.

Five years later, with Yan'an under Kuomintang attack and the Communists in retreat, Mao decided Wang should die. On 1 July 1947, on the direct orders of Mao which were confirmed by the Social Section of the Communist Party in Shanxi-Suiyuan (晉綏), Wang was reportedly chopped to pieces and his remains were thrown down a dry well.

Dai Qing's seminal work in exhuming the case of the writer Wang Shiwei brings into focus perhaps the single most important case for gauging repressive dimensions of the movement.