Chen Bilan (Ch'en Pi-Lan) Internet Archive
[P'eng Shuzi and Ch'en Pi-lan]
Chen Bilan was born in 1902 in Huang-pei village, Hupeh province. She joined the Young Socialist League and the Chinese Communist Party as a student in Wuhan in 1922. In 1924 she was chosen by the CCP Central Committee to attend the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, returning to China in August 1925. She took part in the revolutionary upheaval of 1925-27, first in Honan, then, toward the end of 1925, in Shanghai. From October 1925 to April 1927 she was a member of the Standing Committee of the CCP's Shanghai Regional Committee, secretary of the regional committee's women's bureau, and editor of Chung-kuo fu-nu (Chinese Women). She helped organize the Shanghai Women's Association's participation in the March 1927 Shanghai workers' insurrection. (She left Shanghai to attend a party conference in Wuhan a few hours before Chiang Kai-shek's anticommunist massacre on April 12.)
Ch'en was a founding member of the Chinese Trotskyist movement in 1929. She carried out clandestine work in Shanghai under the Japanese occupation during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). In 1946 she was elected to the Political Bureau of the Communist League of China, the Chinese section of the Fourth International. She was editor of the League's magazine, New Voice, from May 1945 until she and P'eng were forced to go into exile in December 1948, and from then until her death she was a leader of the Chinese Trotskyists in exile and of the Fourth International.