According to the detailed account of his early life and career which Wang gave to journalist Nym Wales in 1937, he was bom in a village in Liu-yang hsien, not far from Changsha, the Hunan capital. Liu-yang produced a significant number of Communists, including Lo Chang- lung, Sung Jen-ch'iung, Wang Shou-tao, Chang Ch'i-lung, and Yang Yung, all of whom were bom in the early years of the century. Wang was the oldest of 10 children.
His father, a tenant farmer, joined a Communist guerrilla unit in 1930 and was killed fighting in Liu-yang in 1932. After only three years of primary school, Wang went to Changsha about 1922 where he worked as a servant, first in the local army garrison and then in a station master’s office of the Canton-Hankow Railway. Within a couple of years he had become a locomotive fireman and in 1924 he joined the Railway Workers’ Union.
In 1925 Wang had his first experience in labor organizing when the Railway Union struck in sympathy with unions in Shanghai where there was considerable labor agitation in connection with the May 30th Incident. The strike was led by Kuo Liang, one of the early members of Mao Tse-tung’s Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New people's study society) and a key Communist labor leader in Hunan until his death in 1928. The strikers won several economic concessions, a fact that impressed Wang with the 4lnew power of organized labor. In the same year he joined the KMT, which he considered to be “revolutionary” at that time. (The importance of the KMT organization in Hunan and its relationship to the CCP is discussed in the biography of Hsia Hsi). In 1925 Wang was also elected to membership on the Executive Committee of the Changsha branch of the “General Labor Union,” apparently a reference to the Hunan Provincial Workers’ Federation (ch'uan-sheng kung-t’uan lien-ho-hui), which, after 1923, was headed by Kuo Liang. During 1926 the union engaged in intensive propaganda activities in and around Changsha in preparation for the arrival of the Northern Expedition armies, which captured the city in July of that year.
In April 1928, scores of CCP and Youth League members in Changsha were arrested, but Wang was able to avoid this because he was then in nearby Yueh-yang. Fearing arrest if he returned to Changsha, Wang decided to go to Hankow in the summer of 1928 where he served briefly in the Kwangsi army of Li Tsung-jen, which was then occupying Hupeh. After working for another month in an iron foundry in Ta-yeh, southeast of Hankow, Wang rejoined Li Tsung-jen’s army in late 1928 and retreated with it to the Hupeh-Szechwan border. He organized a Communist branch in the army, but left it in mid-1929 to return to his native Liu-yang and take part in partisan fighting there. He finally reached home in the early fall of 1929, having been sick with typhoid in Hankow for three months. Wang founded local CCP branches and began to organize the peasants in and around Liu-yang and neighboring P’ing-chiang.
In this period the peasant associations were an important source of recruits for bands of Communist-led guerrillas skirmishing with local landlords and Nationalist troops which were in nominal control of the countryside. In the spring of 1930 Wang helped organize a small band of troops known as Red Vanguards. At this juncture the CCP was preparing to implement the Li Li-san policy of capturing major cities in central China. P’eng Te-huai took Changsha in late July 1930, and in support of P'eng, Wang's unit, now known as the First Detachment of Partisans, attacked the Liu-yang hsien capital. His band of 100 men quickly rose to 4,000 it was redesignated the Sixth Army of Red Vanguards and Wang became the political commissar. However, they were too weak to hold Liu-yang, and after being driven out with heavy losses, they joined P’eng Te-huai’s troops in Changsha. P'eng was also defeated (early August), after which Wang led his men to a nearby village. A second attack on Changsha was mounted in September 1930. When it was repulsed Wang's forces retreated into cast Hunan where it was combined with other partisans to form the Independent First Division commanded by Liu Po-ch'eng. Wang became the political commissar of a regiment under the command of “T’an Chia-ssu”（probably T’an Chia-shu). During 1931 Wang's troops were active throughout Hunan, but their main base of operations was in the Hunan-Kiangsi Border Region, which had been founded in 1928-29 and included Mao Tse-tung's old Chingkangshan base. As a delegate from the Border Region, Wang was in Juichin, southeast Kiangsi, in November 1931 when the Chinese Soviet Republic was established by the First All-China Congress of Soviets.
In early 1932, after returning to Hunan, Wang was promoted to Political commissar of the Independent First Division. He served with Li T’ien-chii, who had succeeded Liu Po-ch’eng as division commander in 1931. Li and Wang continued in their posts when the division was elevated to the army level and was put under P’eng Te-huai’s Third Army Corps in 1932. Wang was wounded in the summer of 1932 during an attack on Fen-i, west Kiangsi, and was unable to return to duty until the winter when he was made a division-level political commissar in an army now headed by Hsiao K’o. Hsiao had only recently been sent to the Hunan-Kiangsi base from Juichin, and then in May 1933 Jen Pi-shih was also dispatched from Juichin to be secretary of the Border Region Party Committee and political commissar of the Military Region. Jen, being a Politburo member, was a much more important figure than Wang Chen. That fall the Nationalists' Fifth Annihilation Campaign was launched. Under the severe attacks that followed, Hsiao’s Sixth Army was reduced in size and redesignated the 17th Division. Hsiao K'o continued as its commander and Wang was made director of the Political Department. Wang left the army in late 1933 to attend the Second All-China Congress of Soviets held in Juichin in January-February 1934, and he was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic. By the time he rejoined the division it had been driven out of its base and into the Hunan-Hupeh border area (see under Hsiao K'o). Wang then became political commissar of the division. The force became known as the Sixth Red Army Corps sometime before it returned to its Hunan- Kiangsi base.
Unable to maintain its position on the Hunan- Kiangsi border any longer, the Sixth Army Corps began its Long March to the northwest in August 1934, two months before the forces commanded by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung began their retreat from Kiangsi. In October the Sixth Corps joined Ho Lung’s Second Army Corps in northeast Kweichow where the two units were merged to form the Second Front Army with Ho Lung as commander and Jen Pi-shih as political commissar. Hsiao K'o retained command of the Sixth Army Corps, and Wang continued as its political commissar. The details of the subsequent Long March of 1935-36 are given in the biographies of Hsiao and Ho. Wang Chen was Hsiao’s political commissar until they reached north Shensi in late 1936.
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in mid-1937, Ho Lung became commander of the newly organized 120th Division of the Eighth Route Army. Subordinate to the division were two brigades, the 358th commanded by Hsiao K’o and the 359th led by Wang. During the early years of the war both units were sent to Hopeh; Hsiao operated in areas east of Peking and Wang’s 359th Brigade was located west of Peking between the Peking-Hankow Railway and the Shansi border. For the next two years it harassed Japanese units along this important rail line, allegedly tripling its firepower from captured Japanese equipment. The brigade nominally remained under Ho Lung’s 120th Division, but for operational purposes it came under the jurisdiction of the 115th Division, which controlled the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Border Region (see under Nieh Jung-chen). Relatively little is known of Wang's work in this period, but an article in the November 1965 issue of China Reconstructs recounts a battle fought in May 1939, in which Wang directed the forces that defeated a Japanese unit attempting to advance on the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh headquarters in an area not far southeast of the famous Wu-fai Mountain range.
In late 1944 Wang’s 359th Brigade was sent south to increase the strength of Li Hsien-nien’s Fifth Division of the New Fourth Army. During most of the war years Li's men had operated in the Hupeh-Honan-Anhwei borderlands, but toward the end of the war his forces were expanding into the adjacent Hunan-Kiangsi border area. It was into the latter region (Wang Chen’s native area) that Wang led his men. In the region around Liu-yang and P'ing-chiang in east Hunan, Wang Chen and his two political officers, Wang Shou-tao and Wang En-mao, established the Hunan People's AntiJapanese National Salvation Army.” Then, in the summer of 1945, just before the Japanese surrender, Wang Chen's troops again moved south, this time to the Kiangsi-Kwangtung border where they planned to rendezvous with the Communists' East River District guerrilla forces (see under Tseng Sheng). The rendezvous was almost effected when the war ended. Consequently, Wang was ordered to march north again to rejoin Li Hsien-nien in Hupeh.
Wang was brought from the northwest to Peking by February 1954 when he was identified as commander and political commissar of the PLA Railway Corps. This assignment probably resulted from the fact that the Railway Corps cooperates more closely with civilian agencies than any other PLA service arm, and few PLA veterans could match Wang’s experience in the mobilization of military units for extra-military duties. Aside from its obvious duties during wartime, the Railway Corps has been used extensively in peace-time to repair, improve, and expand rail communications. Wang was elected a PLA deputy to the First NPC, and at the close of the initial session in September 1954, when the constitutional government was created, he was named to membership on the National Defense Council, a position he still holds. In May 1956, during a partial reorganization of the central government, he was appointed minister of State Farms and Land Reclamation, another position he still retains. Once again, Wang almost certainly received this post on the basis of his past experience in opening and developing lands. The head of the Ministry of State Farms and Land Reclamation is probably called upon more than any other minister to inspect outlying and relatively underdeveloped areas of China where much of the work of the ministry is being done. As a consequence, Wang has often been reported in such places as Hainan Island, Sinkiang, and northern Manchuria.
In January 1927 Wang joined the Communist Youth League and later became a leader of a training class for labor leaders in Changsha, which was held under the auspices of the KMT but was actually directed by the CCP. Wang admits that he could then “barely read and write.” During the spring of 1927 tensions increased between the radical leftists in Changsha, who were mainly Communists, and the military units garrisoning the city. These tensions exploded on May 21, 1927, when Ho Chien, commander of the Nationalist 35th Army, revolted against his Left-KMT superior Tang Sheng-chih and ordered Hsu K'o-hsiang, whose regiment was garrisoning Changsha, to eliminate leftist organizations there. Several hundred peasant militiamen were machine-gunned, leading CCP members were arrested, and the peasant association and provincial labor union were abolished. The final break between the Communists and the Left-KMT tobk place in mid-1927, and was climaxed on August 1 at the time of the Nan-chang Uprising (see under Yeh T'ing).
Within a short time after the fall of Sinkiang to the Communists, it became apparent that Wang was to be the dominant Communist leader in the area. In addition to his role in the military establishment, he became the ranking secretary of the PartyJs Sinkiang Sub-bureau, retaining this post until mid-1952. Moreover, when the Sinkiang Provincial People's Government was established in December 1949, Wang was made a member of the Government Council and chairman of its Finance and Economics Committee, and soon after (March 1950) was also appointed to membership on the Sinkiang Nationalities Affairs Committee. He was also a member of the regional administration, the Northwest Military Administrative Committee (NWMAC), and its successor, the Northwest Administrative Committee, from early 1950 until the regional organizations were abolished in 1954. Wang was also a member of the NWMACs Finance and Economics Committee from 1950 to early 1953. His only position in a national organization in the early years of the PRC was membership on the National Committee of the All-China Federation of Democratic Youth from 1949 to 1953.
Wang’s family life was seriously affected by the chaos that war and revolution brought to China during his younger years. His first marriage, which had been traditionally arranged by his parents, ended in 1927 when his young wife died. He was remarried soon afterwards to a textile worker from Changsha. About two weeks after the marriage, she was killed in the fighting between the leftist forces in Changsha and the troops of Hsu K'o-hsiang (May 1927). Wang’s third marriage, about 1934, was to a daughter of a peasant who became a member of the Communist Youth League and a nurse. When Wang made the Long March, she stayed behind. Arrested in 1935, she was imprisoned in Nanchang where presumably she died. When he reached the northwest Wang married, in 1937, for a fourth time. This wife was a native of Manchuria and had studied at Peking University. In 1944 the Wangs had three sons.
