On 15 November 1904, Zhang Qinqiu was born to an affluent family in Shimen, Tongxiang, Zhejiang Province.

In Shanghai she met the famous novelist Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing), who was married to Zhang's elementary school classmate Kong Dezhi, and his younger brother Shen Zemin, one of the earliest members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

[2] In November 1925, the CCP sent more than 100 party members, including Zhang Qinqiu, to study at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University in the Soviet Union.

In 1936, she married Chen Changhao, political commissar of the Fourth Front Army and another member of the 28 Bolsheviks.

The Western Route Army was surrounded and defeated by the forces of the Hui Ma clique then in control of Gansu.

[1][7] After the Xi'an Incident in December 1936, the Kuomintang government and the CCP suspended their civil war and formed the Second United Front to resist the Japanese invasion.

[8][1] As more people arrived in Yan'an from areas occupied by Japan, the Chinese Women's University was established and Zhang became its dean.

[9]: 477  Her husband Chen Changhao had in 1938 gone to the Soviet Union for medical treatment, where he later lived with a Russian woman.

Zhang divorced Chen in 1943, and married her third husband Su Jingguan (苏井观), an army doctor.

In June 1979, Marshal Xu Xiangqian, her former comrade in the Fourth Front Army, held a memorial ceremony for her, which was attended by Li Xiannian, Wang Zhen, Yu Qiuli, Chen Xilian and Hu Yaobang.