Chen Hansheng

Chen Hansheng
陈翰笙
Chen Hansheng
Born	(1897-02-05)February 5, 1897 Wuxi, Jiangsu
Died	March 13, 2004(2004-03-13) (aged 107)
Nationality	Chinese
Other names	Chen Han-seng
Alma mater	Pomona College (B.A.) University of Chicago University of Berlin (Ph.D)
Known for	Pioneer of modern Chinese social science
Scientific career
Fields	Sociology
Institutions	Peking University
Academic advisors	Charles Haskins

show This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Chinese. (July 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Chinese article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,129 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary Content in this edit is translated from the existing Chinese Wikipedia article at [[:zh:陈翰笙]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|zh|陈翰笙}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

A statue of Chen at the Wuxi Museum, showing his visit to a farmer’s home in Baoding to investigate agricultural production and family economic conditions

Chen Hansheng^[a] (Chinese: 陈翰笙; pinyin: Chén Hànshēng; February 5, 1897 – March 13, 2004), also known as Chen Han-seng and Geoffrey Chen, was a Chinese historian, sociologist and academic, considered a pioneer of modern Chinese social science,^[1] and also a spy working for the Communist Party, most famously active as a member of legendary Soviet master-spy Richard Sorge's Tokyo ring.^[2][3]

Chen was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu. He studied at Pomona College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in History in 1920. He then pursued an MA in History at The University of Chicago. In spring 1922, he enrolled at Harvard University for a History PhD; there he assisted Charles Homer Haskins. However, a year later, he left the United States for Germany, and completed his doctorate in History at Berlin University. In 1924, he became professor of International History at Peking University and later joined the Academia Sinica, working in the Institute of Social Science Research.

Chen was recruited to the Comintern in 1924, by Li Dazhao, one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party. ^[4] During the 1930s he came down on the Communist side, drawing on his field research on the economic conditions of Chinese peasantry for the Institute for Social Science Research. He wrote Landlord and Peasant in China (1936) on this area.

Chen was a member of the well-known Richard Sorge spy ring, initially based in Shanghai. When Sorge was reassigned to Tokyo, Chen went along and worked closely with Ozaki Hozumi and others of the ring until 1935, when the unexpected arrest of a messenger from Moscow almost exposed Chen’s real identity. Chen sensed the danger and fled to Moscow.^[2]

After Chen fled from Tokyo to Moscow in 1935, Owen Lattimore, then the editor of the journal "Pacific Affairs", of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), asked the Soviet Union, a member nation of IPR, for an assistant. Moscow recommended Chen Hansheng to Lattimore, who accepted. Chen then went to New York, and worked with Lattimore from 1936 until 1939, when he was reassigned by Communist intelligence chief Kang Sheng to Hong Kong. Chen stated in his memoirs that Lattimore was kept in the dark as to his true identity as a Communist agent, and that Lattimore’s scholarly and publishing activities were only to be used as a cover for Chen.^[2]

At Hong Kong, Chen was responsible for running a network of dummy corporations funnelling huge amounts of money to the war effort of the Communist Party, mostly for the purpose of purchasing Japanese-made weapons from the Chinese collaborationist Wang Jingwei regime, whose military forces were rife with corruption and thoroughly demoralized.

In 1943 Chen moved to Guilin. Wanted by the Kuomintang authorities, he was rescued by the British and airlifted to India where he was recruited by British intelligence in New Delhi, after convincing the British that he had become disillusioned with communism. Between 1946 and 1950, Chen lived in the United States, working as a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. While there, he was active as the Beijing’s secret liaison with the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA).

Chen returned to China in 1950, and served as Director of the Institute of International Relations attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as the founder and first Director of the Institute of World History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (later part of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, he was put under house arrest for two years and often tortured; his wife was tortured to death in late 1968.^[2]

Chen was later reinstated, and served as Consultant of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Honorary Director of the Institute of International Relations, professor of politics at Peking University, and editor-in-chief of the "World History Series" published by the Commercial Press.

A centenarian, he died in Beijing in 2004, at the age of 107.

Further reading[]

• Song, Yuwu (2013). Biographical Dictionary of the People's Republic of China. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. pp. 31–33. ISBN 978-1-4766-0298-1.
• Gittings, John (April 1, 2004). "Obituary: Chen Han-seng". The Guardian.
• "Legendary Life of Chen Hansheng". China Daily. June 30, 2003.

References[]

Notes[]