aspects of life in Yan'an. One of his friends was killed during the purge. After the purge, Wang was forced by Mao's lieutenant, Kang Sheng, to leave Yan'an and travel to Japanese-occupied Shandong as a low-level Communist agent, where he survived only "through the kindness of peasants". After entering Japanese-occupied China, Wang was briefly imprisoned by the Japanese, but was released. Early conflict with the Communist Party After the Japanese surrendered, in 1945, Wang was pardoned by Kang. He returned to Shanghai, where he worked at the East China Bureau Propaganda Department. He became a co-editor of a prominent local newspaper, and gained a reputation as an essayist and literary critic. In 1956, after Mao encouraged writers to criticize the Communist Party in the "Hundred Flowers Campaign", Wang published ten articles critical of the Communist Party. These articles made him an early victim of the subsequent "Anti-Rightist Campaign", when those who had followed Mao's directions and spoken out were persecuted as "rightists". After being identified as a "rightist", Wang was expelled from the Party, lost his job, and was forced to work at a forced labour camp in the countryside. His wife, Li Ming, was also persecuted for her association with him. After refusing to condemn him, she also lost her job and suffered a mental breakdown. The Communist Party removed Wang's "rightist" label in 1962, but soon after Wang angered the Party again by publishing a story, "History of a Cauldron", in which he satirized the policies of the Great Leap Forward as cruel, impractical, and ironic. This story led the local leader of the Communist Party, Ke Qingshi, to renew the Party's attacks on Wang and his family. Before she died, in 1964, Wang's wife begged him to protect his family by never writing again. Wang blamed the Communist Party for her death. After the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Wang was persecuted as a "counterrevolutionary". He was imprisoned for four years in the same prison building that the Kuomintang had imprisoned him in during the 1930s, enduring conditions that he later described as "fascist brutality". Wang remained a political outcast until 1979, following Deng Xiaoping's ascent to power, when Wang was allowed to rejoin the Communist Party as part of a national programme to rehabilitate those unjustly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Following his political rehabilitation, he continued to criticize the government and agitated for greater human