Ch'en Yi 陳毅 Ch'en Yi (1901—), one of the outstanding military commanders in China in the 1930's and 1940's, joined the Fourth Red Army in 1928 and was an early supporter of Mao Tse-tung. He became acting commander (1941) and then commander (1946) of the New Fourth Army. After 1949 he was mayor of Shanghai and a dominant figure in east China. In 1958 he succeeded Chou En-lai as minister of foreign affairs at Peking.

Lochih, Szechwan province, was the birthplace of Ch'en Yi. His father was an educated man who was a district magistrate during the late Ch'ing period. At the age of five, Ch'en Yi was taken by his parents to Hunan, where his father then was serving. He was about ten at the time of the republican revolution of October 1911, when his father lost his post. The family returned to Szechwan and took up residence at Chengtu. Although his father had been an official, the family financial situation was poor after 1912. However, Ch'en did gain admission to a vocational school in Chengtu, where he received his middle school education and some practical training in the school's machine shop. He was also an agile and aggressive forward on the school soccer team.

In the spring of 1918 Ch'en was attracted to the program sponsored by Li Shih-tseng (q.v.) and other senior republican revolutionaries with European connections to train Chinese students for a combined work-study program in France. Through the influence of Li Shih-tseng and the governor of Szechwan, a special preparatory school was established at Chengtu to offer a one-year preparatory course for the students of the province. Most of the instruction was devoted to French language lessons. Ch'en Yi was regarded as a clever student, though he was more interested in traditional Chinese history and literature than in modern subjects. He was fond of composing poetry in the classical style. Early in 1919 Ch'en Yi passed the examinations designed to select 30 of the school's 120 students for government scholarships to study in France. The group of Szechwanese students left Chungking in the summer of 1919 and went by river steamer to Shanghai. After arriving there in early July, the group was housed for two months in a middle school while they waited for their ship.

When the group reached France in October 1919, Ch'en Yi went to Paris, where he earned his living loading barges and washing dishes. He studied at a vocational school at St. Germain and attended drawing classes at the Atelier les Chaumiere. He also worked in the Michelin plant at Clermont-Ferrand and in the Creusot works. Later, he went to Grenoble to study at the Institut Polytechnique. In 1921 he joined the Chinese Socialist Youth Corps, an organization of Chinese students in France. He participated in demonstrations by Chinese students to protest loans which the Chinese envoy Ch'en Lu (q.v.), was negotiating with the French government for which the French would be given railway concessions in southwest China as collateral.

In September 1921 Ch'en Yi joined with a group of 103 Chinese students in a venture that resulted in their deportation from France. The previous year, Li Shih-tseng (q.v.), then keenly interested in Sino-French relations, had established an Institut Franco-Chinois at Lyon, where the French government had donated an abandoned fortress to house the students. The Chinese students then in France had been led to expect that they would be the first to be admitted. When it became apparent that the Chinese sponsors of the Institut Franco-Chinois, in response to political pressures at home, were sending a new group of students from Kwangtung and Kwangsi, the students already in France became indignant. Their leaders proposed that they occupy the premises by force, a plan which gained moral as well as some financial support from the Chinese legation in Paris. The resulting action became known in Chinese revolutionary lore as the Li-ta yun-tung, the Lyon Institut movement. At dawn on 21 September 1921 , a determined group of students, Ch'en Yi among them, forced its way into the Institut at Lyon. There they staged a demonstration until French gendarmes surrounded the fortress and forcibly escorted the Chinese students to jail. Ch'en and the others were confined for several weeks. They were formally expelled from France in October 1921 and were sent home by ship from Marseilles.

Ch'en Yi returned to Szechwan early in 1922, and, perhaps through family connections, became attached to the staff of Yang Sen (q.v.), who then commanded the Second Szechwan Army. Later in the year he left the service of Yang Sen and joined the staff of the Hsin Shu Pao [new Szechwan news], a progressive newspaper published at Chungking. In 1923 Ch'en went to Peking. There he joined both the Chinese Communist party and the Kuomintang, which were then allied in the effort to achieve a nationalist revolution in China. Ch'en did not turn at once to political action, however. Rather, he entered the Sino-French University, which had been established at Peking in 1920 by Li Shih-tseng at the same time that its French branch, the Institut Franco-Chinois, had been set up at Lyon. Ch'en Yi studied at the Sino- French University from 1923 until 1925; a number of other Chinese students who had been in France with him enrolled there at the s^rae time.

In 1925, when the Whampoa Military Academy was established to train officers for the proposed Northern Expedition, Ch'en Yi went to Canton. He became an instructor in the academy's political department, where he served under Chou En-lai. When the Northern Expedition was launched in the summer of 1926, Ch'en accompanied it as a political officer in the independent regiment commanded by Yeh T'ing (q.v.). He participated in the action at Nanchang in August 1927 when Yeh T'ing and Ho Lung (q.v.) staged the uprising later designated as the birth of the Chinese Communist military forces. When that move failed, Ch'en Yi marched with the forces of Yeh T'ing and Ho Lung on their retreat southward. The Communists were defeated at Swatow in September 1927, and the remnants of their forces were left to Chu Teh (q.v.), who fought a rear guard action at Jaop'ing on the Kwangtung-Fukien border. The small band of survivors then retreated to the southern Kiangsi, where they spent the winter of 1927. Chu Teh commanded the group, with Ch'en Yi as the political commissar.

In the spring of 1928 the group joined Mao Tse-tung in the Ching-kang mountains on the Hunan-Kiangsi border. They combined their forces to form the Fourth Red Army, with Chu Teh as commander, Mao Tse-tung as political commissar, and Ch'en Yi as chief of the political department. The group remained in the Chingkang mountains through 1928 until the Nationalists forced another retreat. Ch'en Yi then accompanied Mao and Chu Teh across Kiangsi to Juichin, where the Communists established a new base in January 1929. Ch'en assumed command of the 13th Division of the Chinese Communist forces. In 1930, when there was disagreement regarding the appropriate military and political tactics to be used by the Communist party, Ch'en Yi supported Mao Tse-tung at a critical juncture in the party's history. Some members of the Kiangsi provincial committee of the Communist party opposed Mao Tse-tung's policies on the grounds that Mao was not acting in accordance with the policies laid down by the top command of the party at Shanghai. By the end of 1930, Mao felt that his position was sufficiently secure to suppress opposition to his authority. Ch'en Yi was assigned to liquidate the opposition group at Fut'ien, a small town in central Kiangsi. That action, taken on 7 December 1930, was the socalled Fut'ien Incident, one of the most extensive purges in the pre- 1949 history of the Chinese Communist party. Tied to Mao Tsetung by his role in that affair, Ch'en Yi was opposed by the top political command of the party, which later was forced to move from Shanghai to the central soviet area in Kiangsi. Ch'en was elected to membership on the central executive committee of the Chinese soviet government established at Juichin in November 1931, but was not prominent politically during the Kiangsi period. From about 1932 until the Communist retreat from Kiangsi in 1934, he commanded the Twenty-second Army.

In October 1934, when the main Communist forces left Kiangsi to begin the Long March, Ch'en Yi, Hsiang Ying (q.v.), and others remained behind to cover the retreat and to attempt to develop a new base of operations. Their scattered troops were forced to fight savagely to escape annihilation by the Nationalist armies, and by mid- 1936 they had been driven eastward to the Kiangsi-Fukien border. After the outbreak of the war against Japan in the summer of 1937, the Nationalists were forced to ease their pressure on the Communists, and the scattered Red guerrilla units gained a new significance. Plans were made to reorganize these Communist troops and incorporate them into the Nationalist forces to operate along the Yangtze in central China. The resulting New Fourth Army was established in January 1938, with its headquarters at Nanchang, Kiangsi. Yeh T'ing, who had been inactive since the Communist defeat at Canton in December 1927, came out of retirement in Hong Kong to assume command of the new unit, with Hsiang Ying as deputy commander and political commissar. Ch'en Yi was assigned to command its 1st column, made up of Communist troops which had been in southern Kiangsi, and was also named a member of the southeast bureau of the Chinese Communist party. Hsiang Ying headed the bureau.

The task of reorganization had been completed by the autumn of 1938, and the New Fourth Army began operations against the Japanese invaders. When the Communists began to enlarge their territorial base, the New Fourth Army reorganized its structure in November 1939 and established two regional commands. The south Yangtze command, headed by Ch'en Yi, was composed of three columns directed by Communist officers with whom he had been associated in the 1934-37 period, notably Su Yu, T'an Chen-lin (qq.v.), and Chang Ting-ch'eng. The north Yangtze command, headed by Chang Yun-i, also included three columns. As these forces began to expand their areas of control, however, they came into increasing conflict with the Nationalist commanders in that part of China. Relations between the Communists and the Nationalists deteriorated during 1940, and by the summer of that year the New Fourth Army troops under Ch'en Yi had been driven from southern Kiangsu into the northern part of that province. There, Ch'en established his headquarters at Yench'eng and began to consolidate control of north Kiangsu east of the Grand Canal. In January 1941, a sharp battle, known in Chinese Communist literature as the New Fourth Army Incident, took place in southern Anhwei. In that action, Yeh T'ing was captured and Hsiang Ying was killed. Of the leaders of the New Fourth Army, it was the dead Hsiang Ying, rather than Yeh T'ing or Ch'en Yi, who was held responsible for the defeat by the Chinese Communist authorities at Yenan. Ch'en Yi was said to have acted correctly and to have taken effective steps to carry out a series of directives given him on 4 May 1940 by the top command at Yenan.

Although the New Fourth Army Incident dealt a serious blow to the Communist forces in central China, it by no means eliminated them. Mao Tse-tung at once took matters into his own hands and in a telegram of 22 January 1941 named Ch'en Yi acting commander of the New Fourth Army and assigned Liu Shao-ch'i to the post of political commissar. Liu Shao-ch'i and Ch'en Yi immediately organized their forces into seven regular divisions and began to carry out policies similar to those of the Communist Eighth Route Army in north China: the establishment of base areas, the formation of local governments on a united-front basis, and the reduction of rent and interest rates in the countryside. Between 1941 and the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Communist units associated with the New Fourth Army succeeded in carving out and developing seven territorial bases that were to be of key importance to them during the post- 1945 civil war with the Nationalists. Ch'en Yi maintained the headquarters of the New Fourth Army in Yench'eng and made that area the most highly developed Communist base in central China.

In 1944, after ten years of intensive and dangerous work in areas nominally under Kuomintang or Japanese jurisdiction, Ch'en Yi made his way to Yenan. He traveled from Kiangsu to Shantung and thence westward through the Communist base area in the T'aihang mountains to northern Shensi. At the Communist wartime headquarters, Ch'en renewed contact with the senior political leaders of the Communist party and doubtless reviewed the potential capabilities of the Communist military forces which he had built up in east China during the war. He also had contact with the United States liaison officers then serving at Yenan. In a letter of 28 August 1944 to Colonel David D. Barrett, head of the American observation group, Ch'en provided detailed information on the clashes between the Nationalist troops and the New Fourth Army in southern Anhwei and northern Kiangsu during the years from 1939 to 1941. When the Seventh National Congress of the Chinese Communist party met at Yenan in April 1945, Ch'en Yi, in recognition of his wartime services, was named a member of its presidium. When the meeting closed, in June 1945, he was elected for the first time to membership on the Central Committee. By mid- 1945, the troops of the New Fourth Army, the overwhelming majority of them locally recruited and locally supported during the Sino-Japanese war, occupied key areas along the entire stretch of the east China coast from Chekiang to Shantung. After the Japanese surrender, these units were deployed rapidly in several directions toward the Yangtze delta and the Huai River areas into positions where they threatened control of the key north-south railroad line from Tientsin to Pukow, opposite Nanking. Ch'en Yi himself returned to the field in southern Shantung, where he assembled important troop strength and readied his units for combat. When the American mediation effort in China failed and civil war erupted, Ch'en was formally assigned as commander of the New Fourth Army after the death of Yeh T'ing in April 1946. In 1947 these troops, redesignated the East China People's Liberation Army, scored victories in Shantung. Ch'en Yi, who regularly wore a beret in the field, became known among the peasants of that province as a master of quick retreats and unexpected reappearances. During 1947 and 1948, Ch'en Yi's forces, operating in close coordination with the Communist armies of Liu Po-ch'eng (q.v.) to his west, continued to consolidate their position. Their capture ofKaifeng, capital of Honan province, in June 1948, netted large stocks of weapons and demonstrated that the Communist forces possessed the ability to defeat the Nationalist armies in large-scale positional warfare. In November 1948, in order to create a unified command structure, the Communists established a new general front command. Designed to exercise direct command over military operations, that group was headed by Ch'en Yi and included Liu Po-ch'eng, Su Yu, T'an Chen-lin, and Teng Hsiao-p'ing (qq.v.). The Hwai-Hai engagement, which began on 7 November, resulted in a crushing defeat for the Nationalists and opened the way for the Communist advance on Nanking and Shanghai. That key engagement took place in the area of northern Kiangsu and northern Anhwei, where Ch'en Yi and the Communist troops under his command unquestionably profited from their familiarity with the terrain and the people. After that decisive victory, Ch'en Yi's troops, now designated the Third Field Army, pressed forward to capture Shanghai and to occupy Chekiang and Fukien.

Between 1949 and 1952, one prominent feature of the pattern of control established by the Communists in China was the creation of several large regional administrations, each composed of several provinces. In general, the jurisdiction of these administrative regions reflected the deployment of Communist forces and the pattern
of military control in late 1949. Ch'en's political commissar, Jao Shun-shih (q.v.), headed the political structure in east China, and Ch'en held the top military position in the region and also held top posts in the interlocking political and Communist party structures through which the Communists consolidated control over that large and populous area. He became second secretary of the east China bureau of the Chinese Communist party; a member of the East China regional government apparatus; and commander of the east China military district. The headquarters were at Shanghai, and Ch'en Yi's principal responsibility was to organize firm Communist control over that complex and crime-ridden metropolis. Ch'en Yi became mayor of Shanghai in 1949 and secretary of the Shanghai municipal committee of the Communist party in 1953. Like other senior Communists in China, he also held positions at the national government level during the 1949-54 period: he was a member of the Central People's Government Council and of the People's Revolutionary Military Council.

After the reorganization of the Central People's Government in 1954, Ch'en Yi was named a vice premier of the State Council and a vice chairman of the National Defense Council. He began to spend most of his time at Peking, though he continued to serve as mayor of Shanghai. In 1955 he was one of ten topranking Communist military officers who were promoted to the newly created rank of marshal. At the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party in September 1956, Ch'en was reelected to the Central Committee of the party and was elected for the first time to the Political Bureau. He was named head of the Scientific Planning Commission at Peking in March 1956 and held that post until May 1957, when he was replaced by Nieh Jung-chen (q.v.).

For nearly ten years after the establishment of the Central People's Government in 1949, Chou En-lai held the demanding posts of premier and foreign minister concurrently. Despite Chou's experience and durability, Peking deemed it advisable to lighten that load. In February 1958, therefore, Ch'en Yi was named foreign minister. Ch'en had headed the Chinese delegation on a ceremonial visit to East Germany in 1954 and had accompanied Chou En-lai to the Bandung Conference in the spring of 1955. However, in contrast to other senior officials of the foreign ministry—notably Chang Wen-t'ien and Wang Chia-hsiang (qq.v.) —he had no significant diplomatic or negotiating experience. Immediately after his appointment, Ch'en accompanied Chou En-lai and Chang Wen-t'ien to North Korea to participate in the discussions that led to the withdrawal of Chinese Communist military forces from that country. In March 1958, when a special office of foreign affairs was created under the State Council at Peking, Ch'en Yi was named to head it. He was replaced as mayor of Shanghai in November 1958, when K'o Ch'ing-shih was named to that post. Ch'en Yi's tenure in the foreign ministry at Peking coincided with the conflict between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties over leadership in the international Communist movement and with Peking's growing interest in the export of political doctrine and modest practical support of the developing countries of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. In 1961 Ch'en Yi led the Chinese delegation to Indonesia which signed the treaty of friendship with that nation, and he traveled to Geneva for the international conference on Laos. In the spring of 1963, he accompanied Liu Shao-ch'i on a trip through Southeast Asia which took their party to Indonesia, Burma, Cambodia, and North Viet Nam. Late in 1963 Ch'en went for the first time to Africa to attend Kenya's independence celebrations. He then flew to Cairo in mid-December, where he joined Chou En-lai. Their party then left on an extensive trip that took them to ten countries of Africa and did much to establish China's presence in that continent. In October 1964 Ch'en Yi flew to north Africa to attend the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Algerian revolution. In the spring of 1965 he again accompanied Chou En-lai to Jakarta for the celebrations that marked the tenth anniversary of the Bandung Conference.

Ch'en Yi's career in the Chinese Communist movement was constructed on the foundation of his record as a notably successful and imaginative military commander. After 1949 he was one of the relatively small group of senior military officers with significant political influence at the top level of the party. While Chou En-lai remained Communist China's most experienced diplomatic negotiator, Ch'en Yi during his tenure as foreign minister nevertheless evolved a distinctive personal style: that of the gruff old soldier. With his election to the Political Bureau of the party in 1956, he became one of the ten most influential men in the Chinese Communist party, ranking just below members of the standing committee of the Political Bureau. Ch'en Yi lost his first wife in Kiangsi in 1934. He later married Chang Chien, who was a member of the executive committee of the National Women's Federation of China. In contrast to the wives of some other senior Communist officials at Peking, Chang Chien made frequent public appearances and often accompanied her husband on official trips both within China and abroad.