As a provincial official in Heilongjiang in the early 1980s, he distinguished himself as an advocate of the household responsibility system, resulting in the implementation of the reform in China's last bastion of collective agriculture.

[1][2] In the early 1980s, when the rest of China was implementing the household responsibility system, Heilongjiang's party chief Yang Yichen resisted the reform and the province was the last bastion of collective agriculture.

[3] Chen's work, together with another official's investigation of conditions in other provinces, caused Yang to change his position.

In a meeting in January 1983, Chen's report was approved by the provincial party committee and propagated as a policy guide.

[3] From 1984 to 1985 Chen was vice president of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and deputy director of the Rural Policy Research Office under the CPC Central Committee.