Wang Ruoshui

Early Life and People's Daily

Wang Ruoshui was born on 25 October 1926 in Shanghai and graduated in philosophy from Peking University in 1948. He joined People's Daily in 1950 and would spend more than three decades at the paper. In 1963 his short philosophical essay "The Philosophy of the Table" won praise from Mao Zedong and brought him to prominence in theoretical circles.

Sent Down in the Cultural Revolution

During the Cultural Revolution Wang was suspended from his post, and in 1972 he was sent to perform labor reform at the Red Star People's Commune in Beijing's Daxing County.

Deputy Editor and the Theory of Alienation

From 1977 Wang served as deputy editor-in-chief of People's Daily under director Hu Jiwei. From 1979 he published a series of articles on alienation and Marxist humanism, arguing that alienation existed in socialist society too and treating the Cultural Revolution as a form of "socialist alienation" — ideas that caused a stir in intellectual circles. On 17 January 1983 he published "In Defense of Humanism" in Shanghai's Wenhui Bao, and that year he helped draft the long paper Zhou Yang presented at the Marx centenary symposium.

Dismissal and Expulsion

Wang became one of the principal targets of the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution. At the end of October 1983 Hu Qiaomu, accompanied by Deng Liqun, came to People's Daily to announce the Central Committee's decision removing him as deputy editor-in-chief. In the campaign "against bourgeois liberalization" that followed Hu Yaobang's resignation in early 1987, he was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party.

Years Abroad and Final Years

Wang subsequently lectured and researched abroad: he was a visiting scholar at Harvard's Fairbank Center in 1989 and 1993, a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 and at Lund University in Sweden in 1998, returning to Harvard in 2000. His principal books include The Pain of Wisdom (1989), The Background to Hu Yaobang's Fall: The Fate of Humanism in China (1997) and The Newly Discovered Mao Zedong (2002). He died in Boston on 9 January 2002, aged 75.