revolutionist and propagandist who became the chief interpreter of the “thought of Mao Zedong” and was briefly one of the five most powerful leaders of modern China. Later he was prosecuted for his role in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

Born into a peasant family, Chen participated in his youth in the Northern Expedition (1926–27) that overthrew local warlords and united the mainland under a single government. He later studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow for about four years. Upon his return to China in 1930, he taught at China College in Beijing, using an alias. During this period he also worked as a Chinese Communist Party underground agent in North China. When war broke out between China and Japan in mid-1937, he went to the Chinese communist headquarters at Yan'an in northwest China to teach in party schools and work in the propaganda department.

During the war years he served as a political secretary to Mao Zedong and began writing major political tracts. In 1951, with the publication of his essay “Mao Zedong's Theory of the Chinese Revolution Is the Combination of Marxism-Leninism with the Chinese Revolution” and his book Mao Zedong on the Chinese Revolution, he established his claim as the interpreter of Mao's thought. Many of the important articles in the Renmin Ribao (“People's Daily”), the organ of the Central Committee, were drafted by him. In 1958 he became chief editor of the party's major journal, Hongqi (“Red Flag”).

Although not usually associated with foreign affairs, Chen accompanied Mao to Moscow to participate in negotiations that led to the signing of the 30-year treaty of alliance (February 1950) between China and the U.S.S.R. He became a full member of the Politburo in 1966 and soon established himself as one of the major participants in and beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution. He was given a position on the ruling organ of the Politburo. Later in 1970, however, during the reaction against excesses of the Cultural Revolution, he was removed from the Politburo and was officially dismissed from the Communist Party in 1983. Chen reappeared in November 1980 to be tried, along with Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, and eight others, for alleged crimes stemming from those excesses; he was sentenced in January 1981 to 18 years in prison but was reported to have been released on bail a short while later for reasons of health.