Background
Chen Gongbo was born in Guangzhou (Canton), Qing Empire in 1892. His father was an official in the Qing Dynasty administration.
Chen Gongbo was born in Guangzhou (Canton), Qing Empire in 1892. His father was an official in the Qing Dynasty administration.
As a student at Beijing University, he participated in the May Fourth Movement and studied Marxism under Chen Duxiu. Chen Gongbo was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and a member of its First Congress in Shanghai in July 1921, but left the party the following year. He then moved to the United States, where he obtained a master's degree in Economics at Columbia University in 1925.
At the university, Chen was influenced by the new ideological currents of the time, although not actively involved in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Upon his graduation in 1920, Chen returned to Guangdong and helped establish one of the earliest Communist organizations there. The following year he attended the founding meeting (i.e., the First National Congress) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai. Chen, however, was troubled by both the disputes at the meeting and the harassment from local police, and left Shanghai before the meeting was concluded. In 1922, in the wake of Chen Jiongming’s coup d’etat against Sun Yat-sen’s Guangzhou regime, Chen was criticized by the CCP leadership, which supported Sun, for his connections with Chen Jiongming. Angered by this accusation, and dissatisfied with the CCP's interference in his personal plans, Chen withdrew from the Party later that year and left for the United States for graduate studies.
Chen received an M.A. in economics at Columbia University in 1924, upon the completion of a thesis on “The Communist Movement in China.” At the invitation of his friend Liao Zhongkai, he returned to China in early 1925 to work for the reorganized Guomindang and its new Guangzhou regime. He was soon appointed to a number of important positions in the GMD and in the provincial government of Guangdong. When Liao was assassinated in August 1926, amidst the intense power struggle following the death of Sun Yat-sen, Chen succeeded Liao as head of the Party's Peasant Department.
In the months that followed, Chen developed close ties to Wang Jingwei, then leader of the GMD and the Guangzhou regime. Wang, however, was soon ousted by Jiang Jieshi in March 1926. During the Northern Expedition, Chen played a major role in the Wuhan regime headed by Wang. After the collapse of that regime, he helped Wang in an abortive attempt to re-capture Guangzhou as their new base. From 1928 to 1930, while Wang was in exile in France, Chen led Wang5s supporters in China to oppose the Nanjing government established by Jiang. Their criticism of Jiang s conservative leadership won them the title the Left GMD.M In late 1928 Chen founded the “Society for the Reorganization of the GMD” (known as the Reorganizationists) in Shanghai, which called for a return to the radicalism of the Party's 1924 reorganization and supported Wang as its leader. So critical were Chen's propagandist and organizational skills to the Society, however, that his own influence in it competed with that of Wang's. In 1929 Chen went to France to meet with Wang for a discussion of future plans. Both of them soon returned to China and organized a series of political and military revolts against Nanjing. All of the revolts failed. In early 1931,Chen consented to Wang’s decision to disband the society and went in exile in Europe.
A year later, Wang decided to cooperate with Jiang and organize a new government in Nanjing. Chen returned from Europe and followed Wang into the Nanjing government, serving as minister of industry under Wang's premiership. Although frustrated by the continuous loss of power by Wang's faction to Jiang and his men in Nanjing, Chen stayed loyally at Wan's side and assisted Wang in the difficult and unpopular task of negotiating with Japan. In late 1935, after Wang was wounded by an assailant bullets, Chen left the government with Wang. Shortly after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chen toured Europe as a special envoy of the government and sought international assistance to China s war effort. He returned home in early 1938 and was appointed head of the GMD's provincial branch in Sichuan.
Later that year, Wang decided to leave Chongqing and launch a upeace initiative” with the Japanese. Chen was said to have been opposed to it at first. He nevertheless followed Wang to Hanoi in December and assisted him in announcing the peace plan. When Wang moved from Hanoi to Shanghai and negotiated a separate peace agreement with Japan, however, Chen refused to go along. After staying in Hong Kong for more than a year, Chen at last joined Wang5s collaborationist regime in Nanjing in March 1940, largely due to his personal loyalty to Wang. For the next four years, he served as head of the regime Legislative Yuan and, from 1941 to 1944, as its mayor of Shanghai. Upon Wang’s death in late 1944, Chen succeeded him as head of the Nanjing regime, but his actual power in the regime was constantly overshadowed by that of Zhou Fohai, the real architect of Wang,s “peace movement” and regime. Following Japan’s surrender in 1945, Chen briefly sought refuge in Japan but was brought back to China for trial. He was convicted of high treason and executed in Suzhou in 1946.
Sometime in 1920 Ch’en Kung-po and his Ch’ün-pao colleagues met two Russian agents, disguised as merchants, who proposed that the group should establish a Communist Party in Kwangtung, starting with a youth league to spread the ideas of socialism. Sharing the widely prevalent interest in the Russian Revolution, and discovering that Ch’en Tu-hsiu had formed the first Communist cell in Shanghai in May with Comintern assistance, Ch’en Kung-po and his friends readily accepted the proposal and began recruiting teachers and students in the schools where they taught. The burgeoning movement was reinforced by the arrival of Ch’en Tu-hsiu himself in December 1920 as provincial commissioner of education in Ch’en Chiung-ming’s Kwangtung Government (see under P’eng P’ai). Ch’en Tu-hsiu appointed Ch’en Kung-po to be chief of a publicity bureau with the purpose of promoting Communist propaganda and organizational work. As in other centers, the Kwangtung Communist group now entered a period of bitter struggle with anarchists, converting some and dissociating themselves from the rest, but the problem persisted for some time because Canton was an anarchist stronghold.