page_title: Eugene Chen
section_title: Chen's revolutionary diplomacy
hierarchical_section_title: Eugene Chen / Professional life / Chen's revolutionary diplomacy
caption_attribution_description: 中文（简体）‎: 1927年宋庆龄陈友仁在莫斯科
context_page_description: Eugene Chen or Chen Youren, known in his youth as Eugene Bernard Achan, was a Chinese Trinidadian lawyer who in the 1920s became Sun Yat-sen's foreign minister. He was known for his success in promoting Sun's anti-imperialist foreign policies.
context_section_description: Chen's diplomacy led one historian to call him "arguably China's most important diplomat of the 1920s and instrumental in the rights recovery movement." Chen welcomed Sun's alliance with the Soviet Union, and worked harmoniously with Michael Borodin, the chief Soviet and foreign policy adviser to Sun Yat-Sen on the reorganization of the Nationalist Party at Canton in 1923.  After Sun's death, Chen was elected to the Central Executive Committee of Kuomintang, Nationalist Minister for Foreign affairs at Canton, and Ruler of Hankow, all being achieved in 1926 he was forced to resign in April 1927.  Over the next two years, Chen lodged vigorous and articulate protests over continued imperialist policies with the American and British governments, as well as negotiating with the British authorities over the massive labor strikes in Hong Kong.  When Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition appeared on the verge of unifying the country, Chen joined the rival Nationalist government at Wuhan. In January 1927, the Nationalists forcibly took control over the British Concession in Wuhan, and when violent crowds also took the foreign concession at Kiukiang, foreign warships gathered at Shanghai. Chen's negotiations with the British led in February 1927  to the Chen-O'Malley Agreement which provided for a combined British-Chinese administration of the concession. In 1929 the British Concession formally came to an end. From then on it was administered by the Chinese authorities as the Third Special Area. While the event as such was comparatively minor, as was the territory involved, this nevertheless constituted both a humiliation and an ominous precedent for the British Empire. In March 1927, with the rapidly approaching National Revolutionary Army (NRA) about to reach Nanjing there was an outbreak of violence against foreigners, now known as the Nanjing Incident, and Chiang Kai-shek launched White Terror attacks on Communists in Shanghai. Chen sent Borodin, his sons Percy Chen and Jack Chen, and the American leftist journalist Anna Louise Strong in an automotive convoy across Central Asia to Moscow. He, his daughters Si-lan and Yolanda, Mme. Sun Yat-sen, and the American journalist Rayna Prohme traveled from Shanghai to Vladivostok, and once again by Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow.
  Life in Moscow from 1928 was far from easy.  After an initial warm public reception, Stalin showed little tolerance for living symbols of the Soviet failure in China. Chen and Mme. Sun were frustrated in their attempts to establish a leftist Chinese front, and soon left Moscow.  After a period of exile he went to Hong Kong before being appointed foreign minister by General Chiang Kai-Shek in 1931.  After brief service with governments in China which challenged the Nanking government, Chen was finally expelled from the Kuomintang for serving as foreign minister in the Fukien Rebellion of 1934. He again took refuge in Paris, but returned to Hong Kong after the outbreak of the war with Japan. He was taken to Shanghai in the spring of 1942 in hopes of persuading him to support the Japanese puppet government, but he remained loudly critical of that "pack of liars" until his death in May, 1944, at the age of 66.
caption: 1927 Chen and Soong Qingling in Moscow
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