[5] His father has first joined Mao Zedong at Yan'an during the Chinese Civil War[5] Shen was a Navy pilot before he was accused of murder and jailed.

[5] In the early 1980s, when Shen was a graduate student in world history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, he was sent to jail again and forced to abandon his studies in a politically inspired incident.

This organization has been extremely productive, helping to publish more than 80 books and monographs and hosting many conferences and scholarly activities, especially in Soviet history and Sino-Soviet relations.

[5] Shen has published more than 60 articles and eight monographs, edited five books, and was the chief editor of pioneering documentary collections on Soviet foreign policy and the Korean War.

[7] Andrew Nathan of Columbia University said Shen is "highly regarded" in China for "nuanced histories of key episodes in the Cold War," which form "a solid contribution to the field of Cold War international history" and that his work belongs to "a wave of independent Chinese scholarship that demystifies China's role in the conflict by showing the country to be a self-interested state like any other.