Ch’en Keng was one of the Communists’ most outstanding military leaders. Trained at Whampoa, he took part in many of the landmark events in Chinese Communist history, including the August 1, 1927, uprising at Nanchang and the Long March. He also spent a few years working in the intelligence network in Shanghai and was among the more important commanders in the Oyiiwan Soviet in the early thirties.
Background
Ch’en was born in 1904 in Hsiang-hsiang hsien, approximately 50 miles southwest of Changsha, the Hunan capital. Ch’en came from a landlord family with strong military ties. In the Ch’ing era his grandfather had been a prominent commander at Shan-hai Pass, the famous gateway to Manchuria.
Education
After a brief exposure to traditional Chinese education, Ch’en ran away from home at the age of 13 to join the army of Hunan military leader Lu Ti-p’ing. He served with Lu until 1922 when his army was defeated by northern warlord Wu P’ci-fu. He then began to work for the Hankow-Canton Railway. This was about the time that strikes were being organized on the Chinese railways following a successful one on the Peking-Hankow line in May 1922. Sympathy for the railroad workers encouraged Ch’en to join first the Socialist Youth League and then the CCP that year, thereby making him one of the earliest members of the Communist Party. Returning to his native Hunan, he participated (in the words of his obituary) in the “national salvation movement by the students in Changsha.”
Ch’en soon returned to his military career, entering a military school in 1922 in Canton, then the revolutionary center of China. In the late spring of 1924 he enrolled in another Canton military school, the newly opened Whampoa Military Academy headed by Chiang Kai-shek. His classmates included Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, Hsiao Ching-kuang, Tso Ch’iian, and Huang K’o-ch’eng and serving on the staff were such important Communists (or latter-day Communists) as Chou En-lai and Yeh Chicn-ying.
He graduated from the Whampoa infantry course with the first class of cadets in 1925. In the fall of that year he took part in a successful drive by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces against Ch’en Chiung-ming called the Second Eastern Expedition. It is reported that Ch’en personally saved Chiang’s life during the fighting. This incident was to be recalled ten years later when Ch’en met Chiang under very different circumstances (see below). By the time'the campaign ended Ch’en Chiung-ming’s forces and several other dissident groups had been defeated.
Career
In August 1926 the Party sent Ch’en Keng to Moscow, where he studied until December. Returning to China in 1927, he joined the Eighth Army of Hunan militarist T’ang Sheng-chih, whose troops fought for the Nationalists in Hunan and Hupeh during the Northern Expedition. Ch’en led a special service battalion. As the summer of 1927 approached and tensions between the CCP and the KMT increased, Ch’en left the Eighth Army for Nanchang, the capital of Kiangsi, to take part in the Communist uprising of August 1. Leaving Hankow in mid-July he arrived in Nanchang on the same boat as Chou En-lai, a leader of the uprising. During the five days the Communists held the city, Ch’en and Li Li-san were given the task of arresting “counterrevolutionaries” and dealing with the Kiangsi Provincial Bank. Concurrently, Ch’en commanded the Sixth Regiment of the Third Division in Ho Lung’s 20th Army.
After the Nanchang failure Ch’en was with Ho Lung’s troops, which retreated southward to attempt another coup at Swatow in late September 1927 (see under Ho Lung). Ch’en’s account of the march south was published in the Kuang-ming jih-pao (Kuang-ming daily) of May 26, 1961. When the Red troops got to Juichin in late August, some of Ho’s forces commanded by Chou I-ch’iin engaged Nationalist troops in Hui-ch’ang, a small town southwest of Juichin. The Communists took the town for a few days, but during the fighting Ch’en was seriously wounded and was taken to a small mission hospital in Ch’ang-t’ing, Fukien, as the Red army continued south. He was treated by Dr. Fu Lienchang, who saved his life.5 Ch’en was then sent to a Japanese hospital in Swatow but could not stay there after the Nationalists recaptured the city. He escaped to Hong Kong and then to Shanghai, where he spent the next three years working in the Communist underground. Using the alias Wang, he seems to have been a key figure in intelligence and counterintelligence work against the Nationalists.
In early 1931 Ch’en was sent to join his Whampoa classmate Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, the commander of the Red Army units in the Oyiiwan Soviet in the Hupeh-Honan-Anhwei border area. Ch’en assumed command of the 38th Regiment, a component of the Fourth Army’s 13th Division, but he was later placed in command of the Fourth Army’s 12th Division. Chiang Kai-shek’s Fourth Annihilation Campaign, begun in mid-1932 had serious consequences for the Oyiiwan Communists.
Having reached J-uichin, Ch’en was given command of a division and was president of the Red Army School (Hung-chiin hsueh-hsiao), not to be confused with the more important Red Army Academy (Hung-chiin ta-hsueh). A year later he set out on the Long March as commander of the Red Cadres’ Regiment (Kan-pu t’uan), with Sung Jen-ch’iung as his political commissar. His unit was drawn largely from cadres of “two military academies” (presumably those mentioned above), and it had the task of “protecting the leaders and organizations” of the Party Central Committee, including Mao Tse- tung. One description of the Long March indicates that Ch’en took part in some of the strategy conferences that included Mao.
In 1951 he was transferred to the Korean 'battlefront, where he and Teng Hua were deputy commanders of the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” (CPV) under Commander P’eng Te-huai. Ch’en and Teng had previously served together in the First Army Corps during the Yenan period. Ch’en was seldom mentioned in the press during the next three years, although he is known to have been back in Peking briefly in October 1952 when he addressed a meeting to commemorate the second anniversary of the CPV’s entry into the Korean War. He remained in Korea until shortly after the armistice in July 1953. Returning to Peking, he was placed in charge (by February 1954) of an unnamed department subordinate to the People’s Revolutionary Military Council, the military advisory arm of the PRC Government. The Council was abolished in September 1954 with the advent of the constitutional government and the creation of the National Defense Council (NDC). Ch’en became a member of the NDC, an organ that meets rarely but has considerable prestige. A far more important appointment was given to Ch’en shortly thereafter when he was named a deputy chief-of-staff of the PLA General Staff, a position he held until his death. When Chief- of-Staff Su Yii was absent from his post from the spring of 1956 to early 1957, Ch’en served as acting chief-of-staff.
From May 1957 to November 1958 Ch’en was a member of the State Council’s Scientific Planning Commission, and in September 1959, during a partial reorganization of the government, he was appointed a vice-minister of National Defense, a post he still held when, at the age of 58, he died suddenly in Shanghai on March 16, 1961, of a heart disease.
Achievements
Membership
From about 1940 Ch’en was commander of the T’ai-yueh Military District in Shansi. The district was one of two important military divisions of the territory controlled by the 129th Division and organized politically as the Shansi- Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region (see under Hsieh Fu-chih). In the T’ai-yueh District, Ch’en came in contact with other important Party officials who were later to become members of the top elite, including economic specialist Po I-po and Party organization expert An Tzu-wen. Ch’en’s lengthy service in the Red Army was acknowledged at the Seventh National Party Congress held in Yenan (April— June 1945), when he was made an alternate member of the Central Committee. The next year he represented the Communists on the field team sent to Taiyuan, the Shansi capital, to implement the terms of the January 1946 Cease Fire Agreement which had been worked out through the mediation efforts of U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall. The various field teams, each of which had American, Nationalist, and Communist representatives, were responsible to the Peking Executive Headquarters, where Yeh Chien-ying was the chief Communist representative. The Communists did not then have personal military ranks, but at the Taiyuan field headquarters Ch’en held the simulated rank of lieutenant-general.
Connections
Little is known of Ch’en’s personal life except that he was survived by his wife, Fu Ya, and sons and daughters.