Background
Ch’en Chia-k’ang was born in 1913 in Hubei, China.
陈家康
Ch’en Chia-k’ang was born in 1913 in Hubei, China.
His education included two years in the study of the Chinese classics, after which he entered Wuhan University (c.1931). His principal professor at the university was Wang Shih-chieh who later became the foreign minister of the Republic of China.
Ch’en joined the Communist Party of China in 1931 and, because he engaged in Party affairs, was expelled from the university in 1933.
Ch’en Chia-k’ang spent the years from 1936 to 1938 in Shanghai, where he was active in forming anti-Japanese activities among college students. At about the time Shanghai fell to the Japanese (November 1937), he became the personal secretary to Chou En-lai and served in this capacity in Hankow (1938), Chungking, and Ycnan until 1945.
In about 1940, he was purportedly the Communist Party of China contact man in the efforts of the Party to get in touch with and control Korean Communist leaders in Chungking. The Chinese Communists were successful in persuading the small group of Koreans, who had been under KMT control in the Chungking area, to move their cadres and military forces to CCP-controlled areas in north China. Ch’en’s fluency in English probably accounts for his assignment in 1943-1944 as an interpreter to work with the American military observation team in Yenan, where he became acquainted with a number of Western journalists as well as the U.S. military personnel.
By 1946 Ch’en Chia-k’ang was back in China, where he served as an economist in the Communist Party of China mission in Nanjing (headed by Chou En-lai) and as a writer for the Shanghai Party organ Ch’iin-chung (The masses). During his time in Shanghai (1946 - 1947) he was also a member of the Shanghai Party Committee. After the collapse of the cease-fire that had been worked out by U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall, the Communists were evacuated to Communist-held areas. Thus, Jiakang Chen was sent to Yenan in March 1947 but was soon transferred to Chefoo (Yen-t’ai) in Shantung, where he engaged for a brief time in Party organizational work. He was back in Europe once again in mid-1947 to attend the First World Youth Festival in Prague, and then in February 1948 he was a delegate to a WFDY Executive Committee meeting in Rome.
Just as Ch’en Chia-k’ang was receiving these new assignments in the youth and student organizations, he was once again sent abroad, this time to Prague to attend the World Peace Congress in April 1949. Three months later he was again in Europe to attend the Second Congress of the WFDY in Budapest, after which he toured briefly in Bulgaria and Poland.
It was also in 1949 that Ch’en Chia-k’ang became affiliated with two other organizations related to international affairs, being named in October 1949 to membership on the China Peace Committee (until 1950) and to membership on both the Executive Board and the Executive Committee of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (until 1954). However, after the spring of 1950, when he was named as a deputy director of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, Ch’en Chia-k’ang devoted little time to his other assignments. Shen Tuan-hsien (Hsia Yen) was the nominal head of the Asian Affairs Department from 1949 to 1952, but because he remained in Shanghai most of the time and never actively assumed the post, Ch’en or his colleague Ch’iao Kuan-hua often served as the acting director.
Then, in August 1952, Ch’en Chia-k’ang formally assumed the directorship of the Asian Affairs Department. For a few months in 1955, the Department was divided into the First and Second Asian Affairs Departments, with Ch’en heading the former. To judge from latter years, the First Department apparently dealt with non-Communist Asian nations whereas the Second Department was concerned with relations with Asian Communist countries. However, in the latter part of 1955 the two sections were amalgamated and Ch’en Chia-k’ang resumed the directorship, a post he held until assigned to Cairo in 1956.
Ch’en’s work in the Foreign Ministry was rewarded in October 1954 when he was named as an assistant-minister, a position he held concurrently with the directorship of the Asian Affairs Department until 1956. A few days later (November 1954), serving under Chang Han-fu, he began the preliminary negotiations related to the question of the dual nationality of Chinese residing in Indonesia. One of his last major assignments before going abroad in 1956 was in April 1955 when he again served as an adviser to Chou En-lai, who led the Chinese delegation to the Afro-Asian ("Bandung") Conference in Indonesia.
In May 1956 China and Egypt agreed to establish diplomatic relations, thereby allowing the Chinese to establish their first diplomatic mission in the Middle East. In June Jiakang Chen was relieved of his Foreign Ministry posts and appointed as Peking’s first ambassador to Cairo, presenting his credentials there in July. Soon after his arrivai in Egypt, Peking and the Yemen established diplomatic ties at the legation level. Although Ch’en was listed in the official 1957 Chinese handbook as Peking’s minister, he did not formally present his credentials until April 1958. Then, when both nations agreed to raise their representation to the ambassadorial level in February 1963, Jiakang Chen became the ambassador and held this concurrent post until Wang Jo-chieh was named as the first resident ambassador to the Yemen in February 1964. Although Jiakang Chen visited the Yemen on occasion, he spent most of his time in Cairo, probably the most important Chinese diplomatic post in the Middle East and Africa.