Chen Gang

Chen Gang (陈刚) (1906–1967), important Moscow-trained member of the Chinese Communist Party’s security services prior to the founding of the PRC in 1949.

Born in Fushun (富顺) county, Sichuan province, Chen Gang entered the National University of China (中国大学) in Beijing in 1925 and joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in January 1927. In 1935, he was sent by the party to Moscow, where he studied at the International Lenin School for two years. Upon returning to China in 1937, he was assigned to work in Yan’an where he participated in building up the security services and intelligence & counter-intelligence organ of the CCP leadership and, during the Anti-Japanese War, worked as an officer in the Central Department of Social Affairs (CDSA). Chen led a contingent of some one hundred plus CDSA officers to liberated Manchuria shortly after the end of WW2 and remained active in that part of China until December 1948, when he was recalled to party central and appointed deputy director of the CDSA. (One source claims that he had in fact been promoted to this post already when departing Yan'an for Manchuria in November 1945. ) Chen was in Beiping (Beijing) in his CDSA deputy director capacity until the summer of 1949 and the dissolution of the CDSA. At this time, at his own request, he was transferred to his native province of Sichuan where, during the next decade and a half, he would hold a number of senior party positions in the industrial and labour sectors in, in addition to being a concurrent member of the CCP Central Supervisory Commission. Purged in the autumn of 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Chen was officially rehabilitated in May 1973.