ABSTRACT
Chen Yi served through the Japanese war, the civil war, and on into the years following the Communist victory. Chen Yi had been first labeled 'Rightist' and then, when the Cultural Revolution began, he was charged with betraying the Party from the beginning, from the time he was arrested in 1933 and sent to prison in Nanking. He was released in 1936 and made his way to the northwest where he joined Mao's Eighth Route Army and began his career as a cultural worker in the military establishment. The whole generation went through it in different ways, dreaming the great socialist dream, then having it crushed, by Stalin and his murderous regime in Russia and now again here in China. When Teng Hsiao-ping finally put down the Gang of Four and took power into his hands, one of his chief aides was a somewhat younger Party veteran, Hu Yao-pang, who became general secretary of the Party.
