Background
Ch’en was born in Meng-shan hsien in eastern Kwangsi, some 70 miles south of Kweilin.
Ch’en was born in Meng-shan hsien in eastern Kwangsi, some 70 miles south of Kweilin.
Ch’en’s family of wealthy landlords sent him to a middle school in Wu-chou, an important Kwangsi trading center near the Kwangtung border situated not far south of Meng-shan. While attending the middle school Ch’en is said to have had family disagreements, and when his father cut off his allowance he ran away to join the Communists. Ch’en joined the Seventh Red Army, commanded by Chang Yun-i, which was organized in Kwangsi about 1929. The army provided the military support for the small Communist soviet established at Lung-chou in southwest Kwangsi near the Vietnamese border. Sometime prior to mid-1930 the Party headquarters, then under the direction of Li Li-san, ordered this army to join other Red forces which were being mobilized in central China for an attack upon the major industrial cities. On its way north the Seventh Army met with serious defeats and only a handful of survivors under Chang Yun-i were able to make their way to Juichin, the capital of the Chinese Soviet Republic (formed in November 1931), where Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te had their headquarters. Ch’en made his way to Juichin with the remnants of the Seventh Army. In Juichin, Ch’en enrolled at the Red Army Academy, which graduated its first class in 1933, and he was among the Academy cadets who made the Long March from Kiangsi to the northwest in the fall of 1934.
Not long after Mao Tse-tung and his troops reached north Shensi in October 1935, Ch’en was posted in the 15th Army Corps (see under Hsu Hai-tung), which had been organized shortly before Mao reached the northwest. It was formed from groups of indigenous Shensi guerrillas under the command of Liu Chih-tan and others, plus the forces that Communist military leader Hsu Hai-tung had been ordered to bring to north Shensi from the Hupeh- Honan-Anhwei (Oyiiwan) Soviet.
During the early years of the Sino-Japanese War Ch’en was a regimental commander in the Eighth Route Army’s 115th Division, which was led by Lin Piao and Nieh Jung-chen. Soon after the war started in mid-193 7 this division moved from the Shensi headquarters into the Wu-t’ai Mountains of eastern Shansi near the Hopeh border. Nieh, the acting commander, divided the new base into four sub-divisions: the main headquarters in Wu-t’ai hsien, Shansi, a base in I and Man-ch’eng hsien, western Hopeh, and two others in P’ing-shan hsien and T’ang-hsien, also in western Hopeh. Ch’en commanded the T’ang-hsien base, headquartered about 50 miles west of Paoting and not far west of the Pinghan (Peking-Hankow) Railroad. When the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) Border Region was established in early 1938 (see under Sung Shao-wen) it contained two distinct areas, one of which was Nieh’s east Shansi-west Hopeh base. The other part of the border region, composed of approximately 29 hsien on the plains of central Hopeh, was protected by Manchurian military leader Lii Cheng-ts’ao, who had organized strong anti-Japanese resistance there.1 Lii was not a Communist initially. However, when he began to suffer military defeats, he sought assistance from Nieh’s headquarters and soon joined the Party. In late 1937 Nieh despatched political agents working in nearby hsien to affiliate with Lii's forces. T’ang-hsien was not far from Lii’s headquarters and thus Ch’en may have become associated with Lii at this time. In any case, by the fall of 1943, when Lii was transferred to Ho Lung’s Shansi-Suiyuan base (see under Ho Lung) to replace Ho as the commander there, Ch’en was identified as Lii’s chief-of-staff. The Shansi-Suiyuan Military Region was strategically important to the Communists because it was a communications link between Yenan and other military fronts. When American journalist Harrison Forman visited the Shansi-Suiyuan Region in late 1944, he interviewed both Lii and Ch’en on the military situation there. His conversations with Ch’en suggest that by 1944 he might have been in the district for a few years; if so, he would have preceded Lii there.
When the war ended Ch’en remained in the northwest at least until the spring of 1946, but after that there is conflicting information concerning his whereabouts. Some reports suggest that he joined the Communist units fighting in the central plains, but others claim that he went to Manchuria to serve in Lin Piao’s forces. In any event, he was with Lin’s Fourth Field Army by 1949, serving as a deputy commander of an army corps. Lin’s men pushed south to Kwangtung and Kwangsi by the end of 1949.
Ch’en returned to the south to participate in the formation of civil administrations in the wake of Communist victories over the Nationalists. When Kweilin, in Ch’en’s native Kwangsi, fell on November 22, 1949, he became chairman of the Kweilin Municipal Military Control Commission, apparently only briefly holding the position. In early December he was appointed a vice-governor of Kwangsi under Governor Chang Yun-i, Ch’en’s former military superior in the Seventh Army back in the 1920’s. (This assignment presumably meant that he was transferred to Nanning, the capital of Kwangsi.) Ch’en also held senior positions on two of the more important committees of the Kwangsi Government. From November 1950 he chaired the provincial Land Reform Committee, and in the following month he became a vice-chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee; he was promoted to chairman in January 1953, replacing Chang Yun-i.
Besides holding his Kwangsi government posts, Ch’en was also one Of the top provincial Party leaders. By 1951 he was second secretary of the Party Committee, another post he held under Chang Yun-i, and after mid-1952 he was the acting secretary. Although his principal responsibilities were to the Party and the Kwangsi Government from the early 1950’s, he also served from 1951 to 1954 as political commissar of the Kwangsi Military District. In addition, Ch’en was a member of the multi-provincial Central- South Military and Administrative Committee from its establishment in February 1950. When it was reorganized into the Central-South Administrative Committee in January 1953, he was reappointed, serving until it went out of existence in November 1954.
After two and a half years of apparent inactivity, Ch’en was brought to Peking to become president of the Peking Agricultural University (January 1960). Virtually nothing was heard about him in the early 1960’s, but in December 1963 he was appointed a vice-minister of State Farms and Land Reclamation, a ministry headed by Party veteran Wang Chen. Following this new assignment, he was removed from Peking Agricultural University (June 1964). He received still another position in the fall of 1964 when he was elected a deputy from Szechwan to the Third NPC, which held its initial session in December 1964-January 1965. Despite these posts, Ch’en’s political career seems to have been permanently damaged as a result of his troubles in Kwangsi in 1956-57.
At the national level, Ch’en participated in the formation of the constitutional government in 1954. He chaired the Kwangsi Provincial Committee, formed in 1953 to supervise the provincial elections. Subsequently, he was elected a deputy from Kwangsi to the First NPC, which met initially in September 1954. Far more important, however, was his participation in the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956. He submitted a report to the congress on agricultural production in Kwangsi, and at the close of the proceedings was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee. In the remaining months of 1956 and the first half of 1957, the press regularly reported his activities in Kwangsi. For example, in April 1957 he met with a group of “democratic personages” to discuss Mao Tse- tung’s February 1957 speech on the “correct handling of contradictions.” A few days later he spoke on the same subject to a meeting of cadres working for the Kwangsi Government.
Then, quite suddenly, in mid-June 1957 Ch’en was removed from the Kwangsi Government and as the Party first secretary. He and 10 other officials were charged with failure to arrange for the adequate distribution of food supplied by the government to overcome local shortages in the spring of 1956—that is, one year before his denunciation and removal. Unlike most cases resulting in dismissals, the charges against Ch’en and his colleagues seemed to be devoid of ideological content; their mistakes were presented as misfeasance. Ch’en remained completely out of the news until 1960, being replaced as Kwangsi first Party secretary by Liu Chien-hsun by September 1957. Although stripped of all his Kwangsi posts, technically he continued to hold alternate membership on the Party Central Committee.