Background
The Ch’en family was native to Huai-ning (now An-ch’ing), a river port in southern Anhwei on the north bank of the Yangtze. Ch’en Yen-nien grew up in large cities, accompanying his father to Shanghai, Peking, and Canton.
The Ch’en family was native to Huai-ning (now An-ch’ing), a river port in southern Anhwei on the north bank of the Yangtze. Ch’en Yen-nien grew up in large cities, accompanying his father to Shanghai, Peking, and Canton.
He probably received part of his schooling in each of these cities. Exposed to the ideas of his father and his father’s many intellectual friends, young Ch’en was particularly influenced by anarchist doctrines. Ch’en Tu-hsiu was an ardent Francophile, a fact that may have influenced his sons, Yen-nien and Ch’iao-nien, to go to France for further study in 1920. They joined a group of Chinese enrolled in the work-and-study program (see under Chao Shih-yen) that had sponsored students in France since the early days of the Chinese Republic. Like many of the Chinese students in France, Ch’en devoted more of his time to political activities than to his academic work. He, Chao Shih-yen, and Ts’ai Ho-sen formed a “trio of brilliant propagandists” who promoted the cause of Chinese Communism through “sheer force of personality and power of persuasion.” Ch’en and his colleagues established small but active political organizations, which by mid-1922 became, in effect, the French branch of the CCP. Of the six or seven functionaries in the French branch, only Chao Shih-yen and Ch’en were full-time workers. Ch’en was also the editor of a mimeographed publication known as Shao-nien (Youth), put out first by the Chinese Socialist Youth League and later by the CCP unit in Paris. This began in the summer of 1922 and continued for a few years (renamed Ch’ih-kuang, Red glow, in 1923). In this enterprise he was assisted by his brother. Their audience was largely the worker-student groups in France and Belgium, but copies of Shao-nien were circulated in Canada through the Chinese Labor Union of Canada and in Shanghai through the New Youth Society.
After two years in France Ch’en left for Moscow in late 1922 or early 1923 to enroll in the newly established Communist University of the Toilers of the East, a school also attended by his friend Chao Shih-yen. Ch’en returned to China in early 1925 and went to Canton to join his father, then the Party general secretary. In Canton he was said to have been on good terms with Borodin, the Soviet adviser to the KMT, and Liao Chung-k’ai, the left-wing KMT leader who was assassinated in August 1925. Not long after his arrival Ch’en was chosen to head the CCP’s Kwangtung Regional Committee, which was in charge of Party affairs in both Kwangtung and Kwangsi. Ch’en’s Committee was the largest of the Party’s regional units, and from its headquarters in Canton it had a direct influence on the many CCP members who were working in KMT organs and the Nationalist Army. By 1925 it had developed an organizational structure that included six departments organization, propaganda, military, women's, labor, and peasant affairs. The Regional Committee also had its own publication, the Jen-min chou-k’an (People’s weekly). While Ch’en was in charge of Party affairs in Kwangtung, the important Canton-Hong Kong strike began in the wake of the May 30th Incident in Shanghai (1925). The strike, which affected industrial establishments in the southern coastal cities in 1925-26, is discussed in the biography of labor leader Su Chao-cheng.
When the Northern Expedition began in mid- 1926, a number of Communist leaders from Canton followed the armies to Wuhan to take part in the transfer there of the left-KMT government in late 1926. Ch’en, however, remained in Kwangtung where he continued to direct Party operations. In early 1927 the Communists in Shanghai began to step up the pace of their activities in order to help the advancing armies led by Chiang Kai-shek with whom the CCP was still cooperating. According to an account by the wife of Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, a decision was made at this juncture to transfer Ch’en to Shanghai to help strengthen the leadership of the Kiangsu-Chekiang Regional Committee. But rather than proceeding to Shanghai it appears that Ch’en went directly to Wuhan where in April-May the Communists held their Fifth National Congress. In the meantime Chiang Kai- shek’s forces had moved into Shanghai in late March with the assistance of the Communists, but then in mid-April he suppressed the CCP apparatus in Shanghai, killing a large number of Communists and forcing the others underground. Ch’en was elected to the Party Central Committee at the Fifth Congress and immediately afterwards was sent to Shanghai where, in effect, he replaced Lo T-nung who had been head of the Kiangsu-Chekiang Committee. Now, however, to improve the Party apparatus in this area separate provincial committees were established.
Ch’en Yen-nien was made secretary of the Kiangsu Committee. Subordinate to him were Chao Shih-yen, who was in charge of the workers’ movement, and Han Pu-hsien, the secretary-general of the Committee. In the latter part of June, Ch’en and Han were arrested by the Nationalists; according to the Communists’ account, Han revealed the identity of Ch’en who was immediately executed.
Ch’en Yen-nien’s rise in the Party hierarchy was very rapid during the last two years of his life, while his father was still the CCP general secretary. In Maoist histories he is credited with having opposed the “opportunism” of his father and although his father left the Party by 1929, Ch’en had been generally accepted as a Communist in good standing. In the first decade of the Party’s growth he was one of its leading theoreticians and displayed good organizational ability.
Ch’en Yen-nien’s younger brother, Ch’iao-nien, also played a role of some significance in the Communist movement. He was born in 1901 and probably had much the same upbringing as his older brother. He too went to Paris in 1920 and helped to organize the French branch of the CCP. In addition to working on Shao-nien, Ch’iao-nien worked in a Paris factory, thus enabling his brother to devote himself to political affairs without the need to seek outside employment. He probably went to Moscow with his brother, but by the mid-1920’s he was working in Peking under Chao Shih-yen when the latter was secretary of the Party’s Peking Municipal Committee. Ch’iao-nien later went to Canton and then, after the KMT-CCP split in 1927 he was a leading official in the Communist underground in Hupeh. He was captured and executed in January 1928.