He was an early member of Chinese Communist Party and was active in the labor movement.
[5] One of his schoolmate at Peking University was the Wang Shiwei, who would become a celebrated communist writer.
[6] Wang later left the party but then rejoined in 1937 when he arrived in Yan'an to join Mao Zedong's Chinese Red Army.
[6] However, he was arrested by the CCP police for penning an article titled Wild Lilly which was critical of the party bureaucracy.
The same year, C. Frank Glass, Yin Kuan, Wang Fanxi and Chen Qichang met to rebuild the Trotskyist organization.
[7] In 1936, Chen wrote to prominent author Lu Xun in an attempt to win him over to Trotskyism.
[8] This was consistent with Joseph Stalin's false accusations that Trotskyists were secretly working with Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan.
[3] One of the sons, Chen Daotong, reconciled with CCP but after establishment of People's Republic of China he was arrested in 1952 during Mao Zedong's anti-Trotskyist purge (to win favor from USSR during Stalin's rule at the time).