Background
Ch’en was born into a poor peasant family in Hui-an hsien.
Ch’en was born into a poor peasant family in Hui-an hsien.
He graduated from the Chip Bee (Chi-mei) School near Amoy, which Ch’en Chia-keng (better known as Tan Kah-kee) had founded in 1913. Ch’en Chia-keng, a Singapore millionaire who gave considerable assistance to Sun Yat-sen, founded a number of schools in his native Fukien in the early years of the century. Semi-official Communist biographies state that Ch’en Po-ta also attended the “Shanghai Labor University,” presumably a reference to Shanghai University, which existed from 1923 to 1925 and produced a number of top Communist leaders (see under Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai).
In 1927 he joined the CCP and went to Moscow where he enrolled in Sun Yat-sen University (redesignated the Communist University of the Toilers of China during his stay there).
Ch’en had already begun to write by this time; as early as 1934 he had published Lun Van Szu- t’ung (On T’an Szu-t’ung), but his career as a Party historian and ideologue did not begin until he went to Yenan at the outbreak of war in 1937. He was immediately put to work as an instructor in the Central Party School and he also became director of the Propaganda Department’s Research Section. He was a regular contributor to the leading Yenan newspapers and journals and served for a time as Mao Tse-tung’s political secretary. His rise to prominence began about 1941 when, while working at the Central Research Institute, he came into conflict with Wang Shih-wei. A prominent Communist writer-translator, Wang opposed the use of literary forms familiar to the masses and accused the Party hierarchy of a variety of faults that are reviewed in the biography of Chou Yang. With the launching of the cheng-feng (rectification) movement in 1942, Wang became one of the chief targets of the Maoist ideologues, among whom Ch’en, Chou Yang, Fan Wen-lan, and Ai Szu-ch’i were the most prominent. In assessing the rise of Mao Tse-tung to supremacy within the CCP, one writer has observed that after 1937 leading policy statements “came more and more from Mao, Chou En-lai, and rising theoreticians Liu Shao-ch’i, Ch’en Po-ta, and Ch’en Yun.” In contrast, after the 1942 rectifica-tion movement, Ch’en Shao-yii, Chang Wen- t’ien, and Ch’in Pang-hsien, key members of the “28 Bolshevik” group, “lost their voice.”
Having successfully carried out the rectification campaign in north Shensi by mid-1942, several key propagandists were sent to other areas to spread the movement. Ch’en was dispatched to Chungking in 1942, where for about a year he was an editor of the Communists’ Hsin-hua jih-pao (New China daily) and the Sheng-huo (Life) Book Company. He returned to Yenan in 1943 and in the middle of that year wrote a caustic critique of Chiang Kai-shek’s famous China’s Destiny, which had just been published. Ch’en charged that Chiang’s political ideas were “fascist” and did no more than preserve the facade of Sun Yat-sen’s “three principles.” This attack was published in book form in 1948 under the title Jen-min kung-ti Chiang Kai-shek (Chiang Kai-shek, the people’s enemy).
At the Party’s Seventh National Congress, held in Yenan from April to June 1945, Ch'en was elected the third alternate member of the Central Committee. He was elevated to full membership sometime after mid-1946 by which time three full members of the Central Committee had died. Ch’en went to Peking after its surrender to the Communists in January 1949 and in the spring and summer was very active in organizing the numerous “mass” and professional societies. In July he was one of the founders of both the China New Philosophy Society and the China New Economic Research Society, in the latter he was made chairman of the Preparatory Committee. In the same month he spoke at the All-China Congress of Literary and Art Workers and was elected a vice-chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the China Social Science Workers’ Conference. He was also identified in two key Party posts, as a deputy director of the Party’s Propaganda Department and as a vice-president of the CCP’s most important school, known then as the Marxist-Leninist Institute. He continued in the Institute until at least 1953 and still holds his position in the Propaganda Department.
Heading the delegation of representatives from the social science conference, in September 1949 Ch’en attended the initial session of CPPCC, the body that brought the new central government into existence on October 1. When the major governmental appointments were made later in October, he became a vice-chairman of the Culture and Education Committee which was one of the four key committees under Chou En-lai’s Government Administration Council. Non-Communist Kuo Mo-jo was the Committee chairman, and two of the other vice-chairmen, Education Minister Ma Hsu-Iun and Culture Minister Shen Yen-ping, were also non-Communists. As a consequence, the real political power fell to Ch’en and Lu Ting-i who was both a vice-chairman and Ch’en Po-ta’s immediate superior in the Party Propaganda Department. Ch’en’s role as a senior Party operative was even more evident in the Academy of Sciences when it was reorganized (also in October 1949). Here he again nominally served under Academy President Kuo Mo-jo, and the other three vice-presidents, Li Szu-kuang, T’ao Meng-ho, and Chu K’o-chen, were all non-Communist natural scientists. Ch’en received three further appointments in professional and “mass” organizations in October 1949, serving on the national committees (or councils) of the China Peace Committee (to 1950), the Associa-tion for Reforming the Chinese Written Language (to 1952), and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (to 1954).
In mid-1955, as the PRC began to step up the pace of agricultural collectivization, Ch’en was identified as a deputy director of the Party’s Rural Work Department, a post he was to hold for about two years concurrently with his post in the Propaganda Department. In October of that year he presented the official explanations at the Central Committee’s Sixth Plenum of the “draft decisions on agricultural cooperation.” This important address, in effect, offered the ideological justification for Mao’s well-known speech given on July 31, 1955, which sharply advanced the speed at which collectivization was to take place. Ch’en spoke in a similar vein in February 1956 when he addressed the CPPCC, a speech that contained the remarkable statement that there was “no sign of overpopulation” and that China could “find room for at least another 600 million people.” He was to play an even more important role in connection with the communes in 1958 (see below), but before then, in September 1956, he was re-elected to the Central Committee at the Eighth Party Congress. On the day following the Congress, a new Politburo consisting of 17 full and six alternate members was elected. Lu Ting-i and Ch’en, by then the top propagandists, were both elected alternates. A year later, in November 1957, Ch’en accompanied Mao Tse-tung to Moscow for celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Immediately after the establishment of the PRC in October 1949, Ch’en made a quick trip to Moscow where he discussed with S. I. Vavilov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, scientific planning problems and particularly the role and organization of the Soviet Academy. Two months later (December 1949) Ch’en was back in Moscow, this time accompanying Mao Tse-tung on the historic visit that led to the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance on February 14, 1950. Ch’en was the only key leader to arrive with Mao. A month later Chou En-lai joined them, bringing with him several other top leaders. Mao, Chou, Ch’en, and the others were, of course, received by Stalin and virtually all the other important Soviet leaders before their departure for home on February 17.
In the early years of the PRC, Ch’en faced the rather delicate task of being the chief of Mao Tse-tung while at the same time reconciling Mao’s “thought” and political career with Stalin’s writings (and, implicitly, the Comintern orders to the CCP dating back to the 1920’s). One of Ch’en’s first efforts in this regard appeared in the journal of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association the day before Mao and he arrived in Moscow. This article, “Stalin and the Chinese Revolution,” was a prelude to a far more important piece that was published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the CCP (July 1951). It appeared in the two most authoritative Party organs, the JMJP and Hsueh-hsi (Study), under the title: “Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Is the Synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and the Chinese Revolution.” The April 12, 1952, issue of the JMJP carried Ch’en’s “In Commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the Comrade Stalin’s Great Work, The Problem of the Chinese Revolution.” Finally, in 1953 (after Stalin’s death), the above-mentioned “Stalin and the Chinese Revolution” was expanded into a book of the same title.
Like several other prominent Party leaders, Ch’en was not elected to the First NPC. But three months later (December 1954) he was named to represent social science organizations on the National Committee of the Second CPPCC, as well as being given a seat on the Standing Committee. He continued to hold both posts in the Third CPPCC (1959-1964); he was once again named to hold these positions when the Fourth CPPCC was inaugurated in December 1964-January 1965, but on this occasion he was selected to represent the CCP rather than social science organizations. In 1955 he received two further assignments in the Academy of Sciences. In June he became a member of the newly established Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences and in October a member of a special committee to select social and natural scientists to be given prizes for their research. He received still another appointment in scientific administration in March 1956 when he was made a member of the State Council’s Scientific Planning Commission, retaining this post until the Commission was reorganized in November 1958.