[1] He was an underground spy for the Communist International, and active as a member of Richard Sorge's Tokyo ring that gathered intelligence for the Soviet Union on Japanese war plans.

[2] His prolific scholarship used innovative Marxist analysis that influenced both Chinese and international understandings of China's village economy and industrial structure.

His book fortified Mao Zedong's analysis that the peasantry was exploited by the twin forces of landlord usury and foreign economic imperialism.

[6] Chen became a member of the Richard Sorge spy ring, initially based in Shanghai, which gathered intelligence on Japanese war plans.

[2] At Hong Kong, Chen was responsible for running a network of dummy corporations funnelling huge amounts of money to the war effort of the Communist Party, mostly for the purpose of purchasing Japanese-made weapons from the Chinese collaborationist Wang Jingwei regime, whose military forces were rife with corruption and thoroughly demoralized.

[2] Chen was later reinstated, and served as Consultant of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Honorary Director of the Institute of International Relations, professor of politics at Peking University, and editor-in-chief of the "World History Series" published by the Commercial Press.

He told John Gittings, a British China specialist, in the early 1980s, however, that he now thought that Mao and the Party leadership in the Great Leap Forward had mixed politics, government, and economic management together with "disastrous results."