The turning point in Wang's life came in 1990, when his first poetry collection, The Wave of Youth, was published and quickly sold more than 150,000 copies. It was reprinted several times adding up to an estimated total of 600,000 copies.

There were more than 50 titles of Wang's poetry and essays selling in bookstores in the early 1990s, and Wang himself even collected more than 40 titles of various pirated versions of his work.

"Wang Guozhen is the one who first brought poetry to me when I was in high school in the early 1990s," says Li Hudie, poet and play-wright. "Although his techniques and artistic conception are not superb, his poems are close to the masses and express a positive mood toward life, which stood out from the 'scar literature' of the 1980s."

However, the sales and popularity didn't earn Wang a ticket into the inner circle of China's established poets.

"Wang's writing had an impeding effect on Chinese poetry," Ouyang Jianghe, a renowned poet of the school of "misty poetry" that flourished in the 1980s, says.

"If we judge the quality of a poem only by its number of readers, then it is a shame for poetry. What represents Wang's poems? The spirit of the time and motivational aphorisms ... These are what I think makes a poem fake."

Wang didn't seem troubled by the criticism. He praised youth, love and hope, always calling for a positive attitude toward life, and influenced a lot of people throughout the 1990s.