Wang Zhen, Chinese Hard-Liner Decried by Intellectuals, Dies at 85

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Vice President Wang Zhen, a general who rose through the Communist ranks to become one of China's most powerful leaders and among the hardest of the hard-liners, died this afternoon of an unspecified ailment, the official New China News Agency announced today. He was 85 and had been unwell for more than a year.

Mr. Wang, who had only a third-grade education, has been a scourge of writers and free-thinkers for the last 50 years, and Chinese intellectuals detested few people among the Communist leadership as Mr. Wang.

Although Mr. Wang's death will weaken the hard-liners' hold on the leadership, it is unlikely to have a major political impact, in part because he already had been very feeble. Mr. Wang was scheduled to retire as Vice President at the National People's Congress that is to convene next week.

The Communist Party Central Commitee tonight mourned Mr. Wang as "a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman and soldier, a staunch Marxist, and an outstanding leader of the party and state."

A small, thin man with an outgoing manner and an easy grin, Wang Zhen was in his own way one of the most constant of China's leaders. While most top leaders -- including virtually all of those with reputations as "reformers" -- take cover when political tides are going against them, Mr. Wang was a vitriolic hard-liner even when his views were out of fashion. Defended Mao's Portrait

In the relatively open days of 1988, for example, there was some talk of taking the portrait of Chairman Mao down from Tiananmen, the gate in the center of the city. "If the portrait is removed, I will never again go to Tiananmen Square," Mr. Wang declared at the time to a top party officials. Today the portrait still hangs on Tiananmen and overlooks the square.

Mr. Wang spoke in the pungent language of a peasant, spicing his speech with phrases that caused eyes of more urbane officials to bulge. He often inveighed against rock music and against literature that did not serve the party.

While the position of vice president is supposed to be a largely symbolic one in China, Mr. Wang invested it with new importance by transforming it into a bully pulpit from which to preach his Maoist views. He enthusiastically backed the 1989 crackdown against the Tiananmen democracy movement, and he is believed to have urged unsuccessfully that special prison camps be established in the wilderness along China's frigid northern border to house recalcitrant intellectuals.

After his health began to fail in late 1991, Mr. Wang rarely appeared in public. He had difficulty speaking clearly, and he had limited control of his bladder. Characteristically, his incontinence distressed him less than it did the sophisticated Foreign Ministry officials who accompanied him on meetings with visiting foreigners. Premature Reports of Death

One university-educated Chinese official who is also a party member said that he and his circle of friends probably hated Mr. Wang more than any other official. He said that he and a group of others began cheering spontaneously a couple of years ago when they believed that Mr. Wang had died -- they had been listening to a news report announcing the death of Huang Zhen, a senior Communist official whose name is pronounced only a bit differently from Mr. Wang's.

Mr. Wang was born in 1908 and apparently was impetuous from the start. At 16, he got his first job as a fireman on a locomotive, but he was soon dismissed when he slapped the face of a foreign woman, the wife of a foreign manager of the railroad.

After joining the Communist Party at the age of 19, Mr. Wang rose steadily through the ranks of Mao's guerrilla army. He took part in the Long March, the epic Communist migration of 1934 and 1935 through 6,000 miles of dangerous territory to a new base in northwest China.

In 1942, Mao appointed Mr. Wang to head a "rectification" of Communist writers. Mr. Wang later recalled that he responded by citing his lack of schooling and that Mao responded: "It's just someone without much education that I want to deal with these cultural people." Writer Executed

Mr. Wang pursued this crackdown with a vengeance. In part under Mr. Wang's direction, one of the Communist Party's first free-thinkers, an idealistic young writer named Wang Shiwei, was humiliated, imprisoned for five years and finally executed.

After the Communist victory in 1949, Wang Zhen was assigned to tame the northwest Xinjiang region, home to Muslims of Turkish extraction. He subdued the area with efficiency and brutality, and it is said that some mothers in Xinjiang still warn their children to be good "or else Wang Zhen will come and get you."

After becoming a general and serving as Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Wang was dismissed from his Government jobs when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, but he suffered much less than most top officials. In 1975, he rose to become a deputy prime minister, and in 1977 and 1978 he helped Deng Xiaoping -- who had been purged -- claw his way back to power. Mr. Wang was rewarded in 1978 with a Politburo seat. In 1988 he was made vice president.

Little is known of Mr. Wang's family except that he is survived by a son, Wang Jun, an executive at China's leading investment company. The younger Mr. Wang has not inherited his father's revolutionary tastes and spends much of his time in Hong Kong, working on capitalist deals. Banned TV Series

One of Mr. Wang's most vigorous campaigns in the 1980's was against a pioneering television series, "Death of a River," that questioned the glories of traditional China and called on the Middle Kingdom to learn more from the West. At first Mr. Wang was the only strong critic of the series, but he prevailed and the series was banned.

He also was one of the strongest proponents of a vigorous crackdown on the student democracy movements in 1986 and again in 1989. His aim seemed to be to restore the sense of order that prevailed in China in the early 1950's, and he appeared deeply distressed by the agnosticism and alienation of young people and intellectuals to Communism in the 1980's and 1990's.

Mr. Wang was among the most colorful and unrefined of China's leaders. When the assistant to one top official visited Mr. Wang a few years ago to read him a draft document and solicit his views, the assistant was horrified when at the end Mr. Wang snarled a vulgar reference to the assistant's mother.

The horrified assistant wondered what had gone wrong, but Mr. Wang's secretary guided him out of the room, explaining, "That means he likes the document and gives it full approval."