[1][2] In 2013, he made national headlines when he publicly confessed and apologized for torturing and persecuting his teachers during the Cultural Revolution.
[1] He told Jane Perlez of The New York Times that the school's party chief, Hua Jia, committed suicide after being imprisoned in a storeroom and beaten for two weeks.
Later on when I served as the director of the school's Revolutionary Committee, I wasn't brave enough to stop the inhumane persecutions, because I feared I would be accused of protecting the old ways and being counter-revolutionary.
[6] Chen's public apology made headlines nationwide and caused much online debate over the Cultural Revolution.
Historian Xu Youyu considers his apology "very unusual", as former Red Guards generally describe themselves as victims of the Cultural Revolution and de-emphasize their own wrongdoings.
[1] After the Cultural Revolution, Chen worked for a few years as an assistant defence attaché in the Chinese embassy in London,[2] before returning to China in 1985.
He subsequently worked for the liberal Central Office for Political Structure Reform under Bao Tong, assistant to the reformist leader Zhao Ziyang, and called for the establishment of independent workers' unions.
[2] He was an early director of Anbang, founded by Wu Xiaohui, which became a successful car dealership and insurance company and bought the Waldorf Astoria New York Hotel in 2014.