That's why his meteoric rise against all odds has always been viewed as the symbolic success of the grassroots. Many disenfranchised youth derive a sense of vicarious fulfillment from his story that when he married the beautiful Ma Rong it seemed to put a nice finishing touch to a fairy tale.

But fairy tales do not last in real life. In the August 14 statement he issued, Wang talked about his loyalty to his family and the betrayal of his wife, who he accused of engaging in an illicit affair with his agent Song Zhe.

It was a form of doubling the double-cross as the agent is usually the closest working partner of someone in this line of work.

What happened next has divided the country into two clear camps. Millions of people stopped watching the Olympics on television and went on a campaign to denounce the "unfaithful wife and the cheating agent". But the nation's talking heads have overwhelmingly chosen to target Wang for criticism. They said what he did amounts to dragging into the open family skeletons that belong in the closet. "It is not graceful to publicly shame the mother of your children," wrote one commentator.

The grassroots who tend to leave short comments below online articles or celebrity blogs and commentators who write long pieces rarely see eye to eye on issues of public interest, not in China, not elsewhere in the world. But never has the chasm between the hoi polloi and the elitists, so called by some analysts, been so wide and unbridgeable.

For the public, this is an open-and-shut case. Wang is a superstar who is a self-made man. He doted on his wife and children. Even though he is no match for his wife in appearance, this shortcoming was overcome by the fame and fortune he has amassed. On the other hand, the "sin" committed by the "cheating couple" was so classic it violated the golden rule of what a wife and a friend should abide by. For all they know, this could be a modern variation of the Pan Jinlian-Ximen Qing-Wu Dalang triangle from Outlaws on the Marsh.