Background
Ch’en was born in Hupeh in 1896, but little is known of his early years.
Ch’en was born in Hupeh in 1896, but little is known of his early years.
Because of his close association with Tung Pi-wu, he may have had much the same training as Tung, who was reared and educated in Wuhan, the Hupeh capital. Tung joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary T’ung-meng hui in 1911, the year the Manchus were overthrown. Ch’en also joined the T’ung-meng hui and later the KMT. He then became a teacher in Wuchang and by about 1920 was among a group of eight men teaching in a middle school that Tung Pi-wu had founded with their assistance. The school was modem for its day and offered some of its courses in pai-hua (the contemporary, non-classical language). It soon became a nucleus for radical Hupeh students and teachers, a number of whom turned to Marxism in the next few years (see under Tung Pi-wu). Among the most influential in converting Hupeh students was Li Han-chun, who had been introduced to Marxism while studying in Japan. Li converted Tung Pi-wu to Marxism in late 1920 when he went to Wuhan to confer with Tung and his associates about the possibilities of founding a Communist Party in China. Resulting from the discussions was a provisional Communist branch established by Tung and Ch’en toward the end of 1920, apparently with assistance and guidance from I. K. Mamaev, the secretary of Comintern representative Gregory Voitinsky, and Sergei A. Polevoy, a radical member of the Peking University faculty (see under Yang Ming-chai).
By mid-1921 the Hupeh radicals were meeting frequently at Tung Pi-wu’s middle school and at the Social Benefit Book Store, established by Yun Tai-ying and his associates in 1919 to distribute literature of the May Fourth period. In July 1921 Tung and Ch’en T’an-ch’iu were the two Hupeh delegates to the founding congress of the CCP in Shanghai. Ch’en’s account of the congress, published in the mid-thirties under Comintern auspices, is one of the few eye-witness reports. It was published under the name Chen Pan-tsu.
After the First Congress Ch’en returned to Wuhan, and from that time until 1926 he was secretary of the Party’s Hupeh Provincial Committee. During these same years he spent some of his time as an English language teacher at the Hupeh Provincial Girls’ Normal School. He also helped Tung Pi-wu and others to establish labor unions that the Party was sponsoring in the important Wuhan industrial region. The CCP took a special interest in organizing the workers of the important Peking-Hankow Railway. Hsiang Ying, another leading Party operative in Wuhan, mentions in his autobiography that he began to organize the railway workers under Ch’en T’an-ch’iu’s direction. Hsiang and Ch’en were among those promoting the trade union movement on this rail line when their efforts were suppressed by northern warlord Wu P’ei-fu in February 1923. In the next year Ch’en worked in the peasant movement with Tung Pi-wu and Hsiao Ch’u-nti.6 This took place in Chin-chai hsien, located in western Anhwei near the borders of Hupeh and Honan, an area that became a part of the Oyiiwan Soviet several years later (see under Chang Kuo-t’ao).
Apart from his work in Hupeh, Ch’en also continued to play a role in the national Party organization. According to Soviet sources, he took part in the Second, Third, and Fourth Party Congresses Chinese Communist sources conflict on both the date and locale of the Second Congress, but it was probably held in Shanghai in July 1922. The Third and Fourth Congresses were held in Canton (June 1923) and Shanghai (January 1925), respectively. Each of these was attended by an average of only 20 delegates, an indication of the relatively small size of the CCP during those years. Ch’en also attended the Party’s Second Enlarged Plenum in July 1926 in Shanghai. The Plenum adopted a series of resolutions designed to steer the difficult middle path between continued cooperation with the KMT and the efforts of the Communists to strengthen their position within peasant, trade union, student, and other organizations. In April-May 1927, back in Wuhan, Ch’en attended the Party’s important Fifth Congress, held in the wake of the suppression of the Communists by Chiang Kai-shek, particularly in Shanghai. At this Congress he was elected for the first time to member-ship on the Party Central Committee. In the same year Ch’en became head of the Organization Department of the Kiangsu Party Committee, which had its headquarters in Shanghai. He apparently assumed this post in mid-1927 after Kuo Po-ho, who had been the Organization Department chief under Kiangsu Party Secretary Ch’en Yen-nien, was executed by KMT police.
The documentation on Ch’en’s activities for the next few years is somewhat conflicting, but apparently he fled from Shanghai to Moscow where he was a student when the CCP held its Sixth Congress in mid-1928. He seems to have been re-elected to the Central Committee at this time. Returning to China, Ch’en went to the central soviet area to join Chu Te and Mao Tse- tung at their base on the Kiangsi-Fukien border. He was wounded in the fighting in 1930 during the Nationalists’ First Annihilation Campaign against the Communists and returned to Moscow for medical treatment.
Ch’en was back in China by no later than mid-1932. From that time until at least through the first half of 1933 he worked in the extremely precarious Shanghai underground. During this period he was in charge of a training class con-ducted under the auspices of the Party’s Kiangsu Provincial Committee.” He also spent part of this time in jail, but apparently the KMT did not know his identity; if they had it is unlikely that he would have been released. Like so many of the other CCP members in Shanghai in the early thirties, Ch'en was ultimately forced to leave the city, making his way to the central soviet area on the Kiangsi-Fukien border. He was assigned to Fukien where he was secretary of the Party’s Provincial Committee, possibly assuming the post from Lo Ming, who had come under fire for his conduct of Party affairs. Lo was considered “defeatist” and “opportunistic” by the Russian-returned leadership of the CCP, the men who controlled the Party headquarters in Shanghai (see under Ch’in Pang-hsien). According to an article in the Party’s journal Tou-cheng (Struggle) in January 1934, Ch’en T’an-ch’iu was one of four high-ranking cadres censured by the central Party leadership in December 1933 because they had not been sufficiently active in a campaign to expand the Red Army. The drive had been promoted that month to stem the Nationalists’ Fifth Annihilation Campaign (see under Lo Ming). Subsequently, as a result of what was considered “wavering opportunism” (a tendency affecting several areas of Party activity because of the influence of Lo Ming), Ch’en was removed as the Fukien Party chief. Several other officials accused of following the “Lo Ming line” failed to receive important positions when the Second All-China Congress of Soviets met in January-February 1934 to elect a new Central Executive Committee (CEC) for the Chinese Soviet Republic (see under Teng Tzu-hui).
In 1938 or 1939 (Communist accounts conflict), Ch’en went from Moscow to Tihwa, the Sinkiang capital, to replace Teng Fa as head of the Sinkiang Staff office of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army and as the CCP’s chief representative in the province. (The complex political situation in Sinkiang at this time is described in the biographies of Saifudin and Burhan.) Ch’en arrived during the period when Governor Sheng Shih-ts’ai was working more closely with the Soviet and Chinese Communists than with the Chinese Nationalist Government. At approximately the time of Ch’en’s arrival a large number of Chinese Communists were sent there (from both Moscow and Yenan) to serve in Sheng’s government. Ch’en, in effect, was for several years the chief of this advisory group. Sheng Shih-ts’ai has written an account of his relations with the Chinese Communists, but it is an account that strains credulity in many ways. According to his version, he became deeply suspicious of the Chinese Communists, particularly Ch’en T’an-ch’iu (known to him as Hsu Chieh) and Mao Tse-min, a younger brother of Mao Tse-tung and also an adviser in Sinkiang. Sheng felt his suspicions were confirmed when his younger brother died under mysterious circumstances in March 1942. He then moved quickly to break relations with the Communists and to round up a number of suspects, both the advisers from Yenan and alleged agents native to Sinkiang. According to Sheng, 656 persons were apprehended and 88 executed; the Communists use far higher figures. Ch’en, Mao Tse-min, and others were placed under what amounted to house arrest in the spring of 1942 and were formally imprisoned that September. A year later (September 27, 1943), Ch’en and Mao were executed, but this was so well concealed that when the CCP met in Yenan in 1945 for its Seventh National Congress Ch’en was re-elected to the Central Committee. According to the official announcement of the election, Ch’en was listed as one of the three persons then in jail.
The Party apparently did not learn of Ch’en’s death until mid-1946 when over 100 CCP members imprisoned in Sinkiang were released and returned to Yenan. In early 1950 the Chinese press reported that the man most directly responsible for the death of Ch’en and Mao had been arrested. He was taken to Sinkiang in 1952 and executed a year later. Another group implicated in the death of Ch’en and Mao was executed in 1951. The Communists published a long account of Ch’en’s imprisonment in 1959,11 and Sinkiang Party leader Saifudin wrote a similar but much shorter account for the September 1963 issue of Min-tsu t'uan-chieh (Nationalities unity).
When the Long March began in 1934, Ch’en was among those who remained behind to lead the small Red guerrilla forces that continued to harass the Nationalists in the territory of the former Chinese Soviet Republic. In the next year he was with Teng Tzu-hui and T’an Chen-lin in west Fukien where he worked at the Communist base established in the mountains of Ch’ang-t’ing hsien along the Fukien-Kiangsi border in late 1934 (see under Chang Ting-ch’eng). According to one account he went from Chang Ting-ch’eng’s headquarters to address a group of Red Guards stationed in the mountains along the Fukien-Kwangtung border to the south of Chang’s base. Ch’en was described as a CCP Central Committee member, an indication that he had retained this post after 1928, during the period of tense political struggle that ensued after the Sixth Congress (see under Li Li-san). Ch’en’s visit to the Red Guard unit probably took place in the first half of 1935. He was then en route to Hong Kong and was seeking the Guards’ assist¬ance in crossing the mountainous region around Ta-p’u in northeast Kwangtung. From the date of this episode Ch’en’s activities are unreported until the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, but inferential evidence suggests that he returned once again to Moscow.
Ch’en was married to Hsu Ch’ien-chih in 1924. She had been one of his students at the Hupeh Girls’ Normal School and was with him in Shanghai in 1927. Arrested there, she was taken to Nanking where she was executed. Ch’en married again and his second wife was with him in the Shanghai underground in the 1932-33 period. She too lost her life, but the circumstances are not known.