[1] At age 20, Shuai married her cousin Xu Zhizhen (许之桢) who became acquainted with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) founders Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao while studying in Shanghai.

[1] Shuai returned to China in 1930 and was politically active in both Shanghai and Jiangsu; she was arrested at the former city in 1932 while staging a women's rally at a cotton mill and sentenced to life imprisonment at a Kuomintang prison in Nanjing.

[1] Xu remarried in Russia while tragedy befell Shuai's family: her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia; her father was expelled from Hunan; and her thirteen-year-old daughter was poisoned to death.

[4] However, Shuai's life as a distinguished party member abruptly ended in 1966 when, as part of the Cultural Revolution, she was singled out for being a potential traitor and imprisoned for some seven years, during which she was tortured until she was blind in the left eye.

[2] Shuai Mengqi died at 12:02 local time on 13 April 1998 at age 101; in accordance with her wishes, half of her ashes were scattered at sea in Hanshou County and the remainder under a pine tree at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing.