After attending a Catholic school, St Mary's College, Trinidad, Chen qualified as a barrister and became known as one of the most highly skilled solicitors in the islands.

It was later said of him that his library was filled with Dickens, Shakespeare, Scott, and legal books, that he "spoke English as a scholar"; "except for his color, neither his living nor his habits were Chinese".

[5] After graduating from university, Chen eventually left Trinidad and Tobago to work in London, where he heard Sun Yat-sen speak at a rally against the Manchu government in China.

[7] In 1918, Chen joined Sun in Canton to support the southern government, which he helped to represent at the Paris Peace Conference, where he opposed Japanese and British plans regarding China.

After Sun's death, Chen was elected to the Central Executive Committee of Kuomintang, Nationalist Minister for Foreign affairs at Canton, and Ruler of Hankou, all being achieved in 1926.

When Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition appeared on the verge of unifying the country, Chen joined the rival Nationalist government at Wuhan.

In the same month, Chen wrote an article ("a special message") for The Daily Express, in which he labeled the British as "the first to subject China to the political and economic domination of the West".

He, his daughters Si-lan and Yolanda, Soong Ching-ling, and the American journalist Rayna Prohme traveled from Shanghai to Vladivostok, and once again by Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow.

He was taken to Shanghai in the spring of 1942 in hopes of persuading him to support the Japanese puppet government, but he remained loudly critical of that "pack of liars" until his death in May, 1944, at the age of 66.

[14] In 1899, Chen married Agatha Alphosin Ganteaume (1878–1926), known as Aisy, a French Creole whose wealthy father owned one of the largest estates in Trinidad.