Chen Lifu

Biography

Chen Lifu’s plans were those of an engineer. By his own account, he was about to take a post as a mining engineer in the United States and went to say goodbye to Chiang Kai-shek, but his elder brother handed him two telegrams: Chiang was asking him to come to Guangzhou. The work was supposed to last a short time.

It lasted a lifetime.

He was born on 21 August 1900 in Wuxing County (now a district of Huzhou, Zhejiang Province), into an officer’s family. His father, Chen Qiye, and his uncles, Chen Qimei and Chen Qicai, took part in the revolutionary struggle against the Qing empire and later belonged to the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party. Qimei was close to Sun Yat-sen and was regarded as a sworn brother of Chiang Kai-shek; the relationship between the future patrons and the Chen brothers rested on that kinship. Lifu studied at a mining school in Shanghai and then at Beiyang University in Tianjin, where he read mining. Money for his studies did not come easily to the family, and he earned extra by surveying fields and drawing maps for wealthy fellow townsmen in Huzhou. In 1923–1925 he studied at the University of Pittsburgh and took a master’s degree in mining engineering; accounts differ on the year of the degree (1924 or 1925). For a time he worked as a trainee miner in Scranton. In 1925, in San Francisco, he joined the Kuomintang.

From 9 January 1926 Chen Lifu was Chiang Kai-shek’s personal secretary. In 1927 he headed the investigation section of the party’s organization department, and with his elder brother Chen Guofu he became a leader of the party’s security service. Their faction was known as the CC Clique: by one explanation after the first letters of the surname Chen, by another after the Central Club. Later, in his memoirs, Chen Lifu denied that such a clique had ever existed. In 1930 he said that “psychological reconstruction” should become the main part of the reconstruction of the state.

In late 1935 Chiang Kai-shek sent him to Moscow to negotiate military assistance, but Chen, travelling in disguise, got only as far as Berlin: the preliminary talks collapsed and he was recalled. In the autumn of 1936 he represented Chiang at secret meetings with Pan Hannian of the Communists, where a united front against Japan was discussed. No agreement was reached, and the Xi’an Incident, in which Chiang was detained by his own generals, followed.

From 1938 to 1944 Chen Lifu headed the Ministry of Education. These were the years of the war with Japan, and his policy was “wartime as in peacetime”. Under his direction universities were evacuated into the interior; from Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University the National Southwestern Associated University took shape in Kunming. His ministry introduced student loans, unified entrance examinations, pensions for teachers and a Teachers’ Day. In 1944 scholarships were established for foreign students of China at Oxford, London, Harvard, Yale and other universities. After the war he became vice president of the Legislative Yuan, the legislature of the Republic of China. In 1948 he went to the United States to support Thomas Dewey in the presidential election; Dewey lost, and the Kuomintang earned the displeasure of Harry Truman.

When the Kuomintang lost the civil war, Chen found himself in Taiwan. After clashes at the top of the party, notably with Chen Cheng, and a cooling of relations with Chiang Kai-shek, he left politics in 1950 and went to the United States with his family. He settled in New Jersey and made a living raising chickens and selling preserved eggs and zongzi (sticky-rice dumplings); for a time he also published a newspaper for the Chinese community of New York. He declined the posts offered to him, among them ambassadorships and a place as representative at the United Nations. His brother Chen Guofu died in Taiwan in 1951. In 1961 Lifu was allowed to visit his gravely ill father; a huge crowd met him at the airport. He returned to Taiwan for good only in 1968.

There he joined the leadership of the movement for the renewal of Chinese culture, chaired the Confucius-Mencius Society and became chairman of the board of the China Medical College (now China Medical University) in Taichung, supporting traditional Chinese medicine. He wrote about thirty books, among them “Si shu dao guan” and the memoir “Success and Failure”; in 1993 came his recollections “The Storm Clouds Clear Over China”. In 1982 he received the first cultural award of the government of Taiwan.

Chen Lifu died on the evening of 8 February 2001 in Taichung, having lived a hundred years.