A00124 - Eugene Chen, Sun Yat Sen's Foreign Minister

Eugene Chen (Chinese: 陳友仁; pinyin: Chén Yǒurén) (July 2, 1878, San Fernando, Trinidad – May 20,1944, Shanghai, China), known in his youth as Eugene Bernard Achan, was a non-native (an overseas) Chinese lawyer who in the 1920s became Sun Yat Sen's foreign minister known for his success in promoting Sun's anti-imperialist foreign policies and for successfully negotiating the Chen-O'Malley Agreement that returned the City of Hankow to Chinese governance.

Chen's father, Chen Guangquan, was known as Joseph Chen or Achan. He is of Hakka ancestry from Meizhou district (present Meixing). After taking part in the Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu dynasty, he fled to the French West Indies where he met his wife, Mary Longchallon (Marie Leong), the mixed race daughter of a Chinese immigrant. Chen, as well as the Longchallon family, had been required by the French authorities to accept the Catholic faith as a condition of immigration.

Eugene was the oldest of Chen Guangquan and Mary Longchallon's three sons. Eugene's wife Aisy was of African and French blood.

After attending Catholic schools (including St. Mary's College in Port-of-Spain) in Trinidad, Chen qualified as a barrister and became known as one of the most highly skilled solicitors in the islands. Eugene Chen built a large law practice in Trinidad, with many Chinese and Indian clients. 

The Chen family did not speak Chinese at home; and, since there were no Chinese schools, Eugene never learned to read Chinese. It was later said of him that his library was filled with Dickens, Shakespeare, Scott, and legal books, that he "spoke English as a scholar" and "except for his color, neither his living nor his habits were Chinese".

After being admitted to the London Bar Association and after practicing law for a few years, Eugene married Agatha Alphonsin Ganteaume, a Creole, despite the "ironic" objections of his family.  By accounts, Agatha was fun and mischievous and terrorized the nuns at St. Joseph's Convent, where she attended school.  Eugene and Agatha would have four children who survived infancy: Percy, Sylvia, Yolanda and Jack. All of the Chen children were accomplished.

After experiencing some financial difficulties, Chen eventually left the island to live in London, where he heard Sun Yat-sen speak at a rally against the Manchu government in China. Sun persuaded Chen to come to China and contribute his legal knowledge to the new Republic in 1912. Chen took the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and shared the journey with Wu Lien-te, a physician born in Malaysia. Learning that Chen had no Chinese name, Wu suggested "Youren" as the equivalent of "Eugene".

After Sun was forced to flee to Japan in 1913, Chen remained in Peking (Beijing), where he began a second career in journalism. Chen edited the bi-lingual Peking Gazette 1915-1917, then founded the Shanghai Gazette, the first of what Chen envisioned as a network of newspapers across China. Chen had given up his initial support for Yuan Shikai, the general who would be emperor, and became a strong critic of the government, accusing it of "selling China." In 1918, Chen joined Sun in Canton to support the southern government, which he helped to represent at the Paris Peace Conference, where he resisted Japanese and British plans for China. In 1922, Chen became Sun's closest adviser on foreign affairs, and developed a leftist stance of anti-imperialist nationalism and support of Sun's alliance with the Soviet Union.

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 advisor in the reorganization of the Nationalist Party at Canton. After Sun's death in 1925, Chen was elected to the Central Executive Committee and appointed Foreign Minister. 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 at Wuhan forcibly took control over the foreign concession there, and when violent crowds also took the foreign concession at Kiukiang, foreign warships gathered at Shanghai. Chen's negotiations with the British led to confirmation of Chinese control of the two concessions and this success was hailed as the start of a new revolutionary foreign policy.

The apex of Chen’s diplomatic career came after he became the foreign minister of the Wuhan Government. He was mostly remembered for his contribution in recovering the sovereignty of the Hankow and Jiujiang British Concession in 1927, which was quite a feat considering China’s weak position at the international stage at the time.

The successful recovery, to a large extent, was achieved through a clever ruse by Chen. As a lawyer, Chen knew well that according to the British law, when the property is completely abandoned, the Chinese government has the right to take it back. To that end, he advised to the British who came to him for help fearing for their safety, that they should retreat to their warships on the Yangtze River where they could be protected by the British Navy. So the British left, leaving only the Indian police at the concession who were then invited for drinks and lured away.

The British Government reacted by sending the Indian Fleet to the China Sea, which Eugene had known all along by collecting garbage from the British Consulate and piecing together cables that were sent to London. He knew that the ships would come at the low season which meant they could not come up the river. In the end, the British government was forced to concede and return the sovereignty of the concession back to the Chinese.

The situation soon reversed. The foreign powers retaliated for the deadly xenophobic attacks on foreigners by elements of the National Revolutionary Army in Nanking, and Chiang Kai-shek launched White Terror attacks on leftists 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. Chen, his daughters Si-lan and Yolanda, Madame. 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 was not easy, however. 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 in Europe and brief service with governments in China which challenged the Nanking government, Chen was finally expelled from the Guomindang for serving as Foreign Minister in the Fukien Rebellion of 1934. Chen again took refuge in Europe, but returned to Hong Kong after the outbreak of the war with Japan. Chen 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.

In 1899, Chen married Agatha Alphosin Ganteaume (1878–1926), known as Aisy, a French Creole whose father owned one of the largest estates in Trinidad. They had eight children, four of whom survived childhood: Percy (1901-1986), a lawyer, worked with his father for many years; (Sylvia) Si-lan (1905-1996), an internationally known dancer, married the American film historian Jay Leyda; Yolanda (1913- ); and Jack (1908-1995), who made an international reputation as a journalistic cartoonist during the Sino-Japanese War, and who wrote A Year in Upper Felicity, an account of his experience in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. In 1958, Jack married Chen Yuan-tsung. 

Aisy died of breast cancer in May 1926. Chen and Chang Li Ying (later known as Georgette Chen) were married in 1930 and remained together until Chen's death in 1944.