Background
Ch’en was born in Ching-p’u hsien, which lies a few miles west of Shanghai, in Kiangsu province. His original name was Liao Ch’en-yun, and he has also been known by the name Liao Ch’eng-yun.
Ch’en was born in Ching-p’u hsien, which lies a few miles west of Shanghai, in Kiangsu province. His original name was Liao Ch’en-yun, and he has also been known by the name Liao Ch’eng-yun.
In his early years Ch’en worked as a typesetter for the famous Commercial Press in Shanghai.
He joined the CCP in 1924 and played his first important role in Party affairs the next year as a participant in the May 30th Movement (see under Li Li-san). At this juncture the Communists set up the Shanghai General Trade Union under Li Li-san’s direction; Communist historians credit Ch’en with having been one of the organizers of this key union. At the same time a trade union organization was established in the Commercial Press, and sometime within the next two years Ch’en was elected its chairman. During the ensuing months he worked with Li Li-san, Liu Shao-ch’i and others, and in February-March 1927 he assisted Chou En-lai and Chao Shih-yen in organizing insurrectionary strikes. These were designed to gain control of Shanghai in advance of the arrival of the Northern Expeditionary forces, which were converging on the city. The CCP continued to maintain its uneasy alliance with the KMT after Chiang Kai-shek led his troops into Shanghai in late March. However, on April 12 he turned on the Communists, killing many of them and forcing others to go underground or flee the city.
Ch’en fled to his native Ching-p’u, organizing peasant uprisings there and in neighboring Sung-chiang hsien to the south, presumably in coordination with the uprisings being led by Mao Tse-tung and others in central China.
Ch’en’s activities during the next few years are unrecorded, but by 1931 he had gone to the Kiangsi-Fukien border area where Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung had built up a sizable military force. Until the Long March began in 1934, Ch’en was chiefly occupied with Party organizational work and as chairman of the labor federation in the central soviet area. He also contributed to Tou-cheng (Struggle) and other Party journals in those years. Inferential evidence suggests that he occasionally made covert trips to Shanghai and other major cities; a semi-official biography of Ch’en asserts that he was “responsible” for labor affairs in KMT-controlled areas, and he spoke on this subject at the Party’s Fifth Plenum held in Juichin, Kiangsi, in January 1934. At this same Plenum he was elected to the Party’s Central Committee. Ch’en is one of the very few Communists still active in the mid-sixties who has continuously held a Central Committee seat since 1934.
Ch’en remained in Moscow for about two years, but by the early part of 1937 he went to Sinkiang. At this juncture Sinkiang warlord governor Sheng Shih-ts’ai was cultivating tics with both the Moscow and Yenan Communists in spite of Nanking’s opposition to such moves. Ch’en served as a liaison officer with Soviet officials in Tihwa (the Sinkiang capital). It is possible, though undocumented, that he played some role in the establishment in Sinkiang of a permanent CCP liaison mission, which was set up in that year when Teng Fa arrived from Yenan. In the spring of 1937 Ch’en was ordered by the Party Center in Yenan to contact remnants of the Long Marchers who had been driven up the Kansu Corridor and were moving toward Sinkiang. Ch’en rendezvoused with these men on May 1, 1937, in the small town of Hsing-hsing-hsia on the Kansu-Sinkiang border. He then accompanied them back to Tihwa, but before long they turned around and made the long journey to join the Maoist elements in north Shensi. Ch’en reached Yenan before the end of 1937, and at that time, or early in 1938, he became director of the Party’s Organization Department. He seems to have succeeded Liu Shao-ch’i in this post and continued to hold it until about 1940.
Ch’en was apparently elected to the Politburo in 1940 (although some sources use 1945) by which time he had moved into the inner circle of the Maoist leadership. One writer, commenting on M ao’s rise to supremacy in the late thirties and early forties, 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.” Coinciding with this ascendancy, the key leaders of the “28 Bolsheviks” group, Ch’en Shao-yii, Chang Wen-t’ien, and Ch’in Pang-hsien, began to lose their influence in the Party hierarchy, particularly after the 1942 Cheng-feng (rectification) movement. In 1939, Che’n Yun had published Tsen-yang tso i-ko kung-ch’an tang yuan (How to be a Communist Party member). It came out only a few weeks before Liu Shao-ch’i published his famous How to Be a Good Communist. Whereas Liu “discusses the ‘cultivation’ of the best-quality members,” Ch’en’s work deals with formal requirements (e.g., age qualifications, probationary membership) and stresses that “workers should be the ‘foundation’ ” of the Party, although the Party “should also pay attention to poor peasants, intellectuals, and women.” One writer has summarized Ch’en’s primary membership conditions as: “struggle all one’s lifetime for communism; place revolutionary interests above everything; obey party discipline and keep party secrets; carry out decisions unflinchingly; be an example for the masses; and study.”
By the time of the 1942 rectification movement, Ch’en was devoting most of his time to economic questions. His first specific assignment in this field was related to the disintegration of the wartime KMT-ССР cooperation, that had become evident by the 1939-40 period. To combat the KMT economic blockade of the Communist regions in north China, the CCP adopted a series of measures, one of which was the creation of a special office to manage and coordinate financial and economic affairs in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia and the Shansi-Suiyuan Border Regions. Ch’en was made its director, retaining the post throughout the remaining war years. Concurrently, he headed the Party Central Committee’s Finance and Economics Department, with Li Fu-ch’un as one of his key assistants. From this period through the first decade of the PRC Ch’en was the Communists’ top economic expert.
In August-September 1952 Ch’en was Chou En-Iai’s senior deputy on a mission to Moscow. The visit was of particular importance because it resulted in the first modification of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Alliance. An agreement was reached to return to complete Chinese control the important Chinese Changchun Railway in Manchuria. However, because the Korean War was still being fought, both sides agreed to the extension of the joint use of the naval facilities at Port Arthur-Dairen. Two months after returning home Ch’en was made a member of the State Planning Commission, which was established in anticipation of the First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957). In view of Ch’cn’s pre-eminence in the economics field, it seems somewhat unusual that the chairmanship fell to Kao Kang. And, in fact, Ch’en’s role in economic affairs diminished in 1953. However, Kao fell from power in early 1954, and by the middle of the year Ch’en was identified as a “close comrade-in-arms” of Mao Tse-tung, an accolade reserved for the favored few. He was by now the fifth-ranking leader (behind Mao, Liu Shao-ch’i, Chou En-lai, and Chu Te), a position he was to hold for three more years. In September-October 1954 Ch’en once again assisted Chou En-lai in negotiations with the Soviet Union. These took place when Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin led what was probably the most important delegation to visit Peking after 1949. A wide range of questions vital to both nations was reviewed, and several new agreements were reached that markedly altered the Sino-Soviet relationship (e.g., the USSR agreed to turn over to China the Port Arthur-Dairen naval facilities and several “joint” stock companies were given to the Chinese).
Ch’en’s dominance in the field of economics during the early PRC years can scarcely be exaggerated, particularly during the period of “reconstruction and rehabilitation” (1949-1952), that preceded the First Five-Year Plan. He was the keynote speaker at virtually every important economic conference and made innumerable reports on economic affairs before the leading government bodies. His speeches and reports were regularly carried in the leading newspapers and journals and were frequently reprinted in pamphlets (published in both Chinese and English). In addition to his positions in the permanent economic apparatus, Ch’en even chaired several ad hoc bodies. For example, before the PRC was a month old he was heading a special committee for “take-over work,” that is, to take over the materials, personnel,' and so on, from KMT organs. One of his most notable achievements as China’s new economic “czar” was to halt the runaway inflation that had so badly crippled the KMT in its final years on the mainland.
Mobilizing managerial talent and excess capital was given priority attention in the early years of the PRC. Mao Tse-tung addressed himself to this problem in June 1950 at the second session of the CPPCC when the Communists were still willing to deal quite cautiously with the bourgeois elements. At this same meeting, Ch’en elaborated on this question, indicating that because of China’s “backwardness” it would be “progressive” to allow the “national capitalists to develop industry and make investments in it for a long time.” However, the Party subjected the “capitalists” to the rigorous “five-anti” campaign in 1951-52 (against alleged corruption, etc.). Then in the early part of 1952 the Communists all but admitted that the campaign had been pushed too vigorously, and it appears that Ch’en was called upon to reassure the business elements that, within carefully defined limits, the Party was still willing to cooperate with them. This important speech, which set the tone for “communist-capitalist” relations for the next three years, was made in June 1952 at the preparatory meeting of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (see under Hsu Ti- hsin).
During the mid-fifties Ch’en was primarily occupied with commercial problems (e.g., the supply of consumer goods, problems of grain distribution). He delivered lengthy reports on these questions at the annual NPC sessions and also at the Party’s Second Plenum in November 1956. The day after this Plenum closed he re-placed Tseng Shan as minister of Commerce (renamed First Ministry of Commerce in February 1958). The evidence suggests that by this time Ch’en had come to be regarded as an economic “conservative” or “gradualist” and headed a loosely defined “opinion group,” which stood at odds with a Maoist element that wanted to
develop the national economy at a faster pace. The issue, apparently, hung in the balance for about a year until the Party’s Third Plenum in September-October 1957. In summarizing the intra-Party arguments that prevailed in the latter part of 1957, one writer has commented that the Maoist group ‘advocated a policy of social mobilization in order to achieve rapid economic growth. Another group, headed by Ch’en Yun, advocated a policy of material incentives in order to achieve a more balanced, though slower, economic growth.”
The triumph of the Maoist group found its expression in the launching of the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Ch’en’s fall from effective political power can be dated from late 1957 and early 1958, but the differences of opinion were never openly articulated in terms of personalities. Yet his decline became apparent in a relatively short time. In September 1958 he was removed from the Commerce Ministry (which had already lost many of its broad powers), and although he was appointed at this time to head the newly formed State Capital Construction Commission, virtually nothing was reported of his work in this body. Finally, in January 1961, the Commission was abolished, with its functions assumed by the State Planning Commission under Li Fu-ch’un, the man who seems to have benefited most directly from Ch’en’s decline in the sphere of economics. One of Ch’en’s last important assignments was undertaken in May 1958 when he went to Moscow as Peking’s “observer” to meetings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (the economic arm of the Warsaw Pact nations). The day after the meetings closed he attended the one-day session of the Warsaw Pact, again as an observer.
At the Party’s Seventh National Congress, held in Yenan from April to June 1945, Ch’en served on the 15-member presidium (steering committee) and was re-elected to the Central Committee. He was elected (or possibly re-elected) to the Politburo and made an alternate member of the Secretariat. The latter body was, in effect, the “inner” or “super” Politburo until the new Party Constitution was adopted in 1956. The exact membership of the Secretariat in the late 1940’s is not known, but it apparently included only Mao, Liu Shao-ch’i, Chou En-lai, Jen Pi-shih, Chu Те, and possibly one or two more. Ch’en remained an alternate member until sometime after Jen’s death in 1950 when he was elevated to full membership.