Family Profiles
Four generations of key figures · Tap a card to open the full profile
Chen Chengzong
Chen Chengzong, courtesy name Shouzhuo, was born in 1898 into a scholarly family in Wu County, Jiangsu. His father, Chen Zhaoyuan, was a successful provincial examination candidate (juren) of the late Qing dynasty who had served as a clerk at the Jiangnan Arsenal. Bright from an early age, Chengzong was admitted to Jiangsu Provincial No. 1 Middle School at sixteen. In 1919 he sailed east to Japan and enrolled in the Faculty of Economics at Waseda University, where he became acquainted with fellow countrymen such as Liang Shuming and Li Shutong. He completed his studies and returned to China in 1925, holding posts successively at the Commercial Press in Shanghai and at National Central University in Nanjing. In 1929, together with fellow townsmen, he co-founded the Wu County Chengyu Textile Mill and established the Chengyu Primary School in his hometown, advocating the ideals of "serving society through industry, and cultivating people through education." During the War of Resistance against Japan, he moved his entire family west to Kunming, bringing the mill's technical backbone to the rear to continue production. After 1949 he stayed on as an adviser to a public-private joint enterprise. He died of illness in Shanghai in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight.
Chen Shouren
Chen Shouren was born in August 1925 in the French Concession of Shanghai. In 1937 he moved west with his mother and completed his secondary education in Kunming as a youth. In 1946 he was admitted to the Department of Physics at the National Southwest Associated University (Lianda), studying under masters such as Wu Ta-You and Wang Zhuxi, and graduated in 1950 from Tsinghua University (to which he transferred after Lianda was demobilized). From 1952 he taught in the physics department of a certain university and took part in China's early fundamental research on semiconductor materials. Between 1957 and 1965 he was seconded to a research institution to work on a major project (the specifics of which were only partially declassified in 2015). After resuming academic work in 1978, he trained more than forty master's and doctoral students. He authored "Fundamentals of Semiconductor Physics" (1985) and "Notes of a Physicist" (1998). He died of lung cancer in Beijing in 2008 at the age of eighty-three.
Chen Shoude
Chen Shoude was born in Shanghai in 1928. In his early years he studied in Kunming alongside his elder brother. In 1948 he was admitted to the Medical School of National Central University, and after graduating in 1953 he went to the Northeast to work in public health. In the early 1960s he took part in medical aid to frontier regions. He died of illness in Harbin in 1995 at the age of sixty-seven. He never married and left no descendants.
Chen Zhaohua
Chen Zhaohua was born in Beijing in November 1955. He grew up as a youth during turbulent years. After the National College Entrance Examination was restored in 1977, he was admitted in the first cohort to the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1982. In 1985 he went to Stanford University in the United States as a state-sponsored doctoral student, earning his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering in 1990. After returning to China he first held a post at a research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1992, together with three fellow returnees from overseas study, he co-founded Huachen Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., focusing on the research and development of communications chips. The company completed its joint-stock restructuring in 1998 and listed overseas in 2003. He currently serves as honorary chairman of the board of Huachen Technology Group and is a visiting professor at several universities. He has one son and one daughter.
Su Wenqi
Su Wenqi was born in Hangzhou in 1958. She met Chen Zhaohua while studying in the United States in the 1980s, and after returning to China in 1991 she taught at a university in Beijing. She has long devoted herself to the study of modern Chinese history and is the author of scholarly works including "The Jiangnan Industrialist Community of the 1920s" (2006).