After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Cheng joined other Protestant leaders to form the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which promised independence of foreign financing and control in return for religious autonomy.

[1] Cheng was the second child of a poor barrel and cask maker, born near the prosperous mid-Yangtze valley city of Wuchang, Hubei.

[1] At age 16, Cheng entered the Wesley College (Powen Middle School) in Wuchang, where he was among the first Chinese to study with the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden.

[3] After graduation, Cheng took a job in a local business in order to support his parents, but his new marriage, apparently a happy one, ended after only six months in 1906 with the death of his wife.

While there, he enrolled as an undergraduate at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, where he applied credits from China and worked straight through in order to graduate in one year, at the age of thirty-eight.

[6] Following the May Thirtieth Incident of 1925, in which British-led troops killed unarmed student demonstrators in Shanghai, Cheng was forced to resign from his teaching post.

En route, he participated in the International Missionary Council Conference in Jerusalem, a convocation that did much to advance the cause of ecumenical Christianity outside Europe and North America.

[7][8] After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in August 1937, Cheng offered to re-join his original home, the Covenant Mission group in Central China in spite of his longstanding reluctance to work in foreign-dominated organizations.

Citing the doctrine "Love Country--Love-Church", Cheng and Wu Yaozong called for the government to follow the policies of religious freedom in Article 88 of the Constitution.