When it comes to the most powerful ruler of the twentieth century, who could possibly compare to Chen Ke?

This colossus, perched atop the pinnacle of power for half a century, ruled one-third of the earth's population. His dominion stretched from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle. With a single command, tens of millions of soldiers would march to war. The proud Americans boasted they dared to attack anyone except God — but the mighty People's Army did not even spare God a second glance.

He reigned supreme over his era, inspiring countless people to tremble and curse, but also inspiring countless others to rise with fervor and offer their blessings and praise. Some damned him to hell; others said heaven had already reserved him a seat. With a man like this, you cannot know how bad he was without knowing how good he was, cannot know how many people hated him without knowing how many loved him, cannot know what he destroyed without knowing what he created, cannot know how close he stood to the Devil without knowing how closely he resembled God. His very existence was the ultimate contradiction — and writing the biography of such a man is an equally contradictory and formidable undertaking.

Understanding this, the reader should appreciate that even though the author has done his utmost, the result inevitably falls far short of the facts and the truth. One must not harbor unrealistic expectations for this book. If anyone believes that reading these few hundred pages will grant them understanding of the man described within, that would be the gravest error and the deepest ignorance. In human history, there are certain people who simply cannot be reproduced in words. Chen Ke is one of them.

Thirty years have passed since Chen Ke's death. We now stand at the dawn of a new century, and the magnificent twentieth century has already receded into history along with the countless giants who defined it. There is a Chinese saying — "the coffin is sealed and the verdict is rendered" — meaning roughly that once a man is buried, a final judgment may be passed upon his life. For a man like Chen Ke, however, such a judgment obviously requires far more time. Thirty years is merely the blink of an eye in the sealing of his coffin.

Before passing judgment on this man, I would like to tell a story first — something I personally experienced in China. Its occurrence gave me the faintest sense of touching the pulse of a great era.

This happened just one month ago, during my last trip to China before this book's publication — to China's capital, Zhengzhou. In front of a somewhat crowded shop, a young man tried to cut in line. This immediately drew the fury of the crowd. Yet the young man was arrogant and shouted for all to hear: "Do you know who I am?!"

At this, a man of about thirty pointed at the youth and bellowed: "Who are you? I don't give a damn who you are! Do you know where you are?! To the east is Chairman Chen's Memorial Hall! And right next to Chairman Chen's Memorial Hall, you have the nerve to cut in line?! You have the goddamn nerve to cut in line?!"

The incident ended with the young man rendered speechless, slinking away in disgrace. I strained to look eastward. Roughly two miles away, I could just make out a corner of the Chen Ke Memorial Hall. This man who had been dead for thirty years still wielded such immense influence — it seemed that merely invoking his name could banish the world's darkness and filth, and leave those with ugly hearts nowhere to hide.

I have more than once encountered intellectuals who criticize Chen Ke. They say he spent his life as a dictator, cultivating a personality cult, fooling the people into treating him as a religious leader, a living god. I partially agree with this assessment. In many places, the people truly do regard him as a living deity. His position in the hearts of the Chinese people is no less than God's position in the hearts of Americans — and may even surpass it.

Yet when real-world injustice and oppression rear their heads, who does not return to the side of this born rebel, drawing strength from him to resist reality? Who would ignore everything he did for the people of this nation and instead place their hopes in those who amount to nothing?

As long as this world still harbors injustice, Chen Ke will never disappear. This warrior who spent his entire life opposing idealism ultimately became, after death, a part of idealism itself — a spiritual anchor for the people, a new living god.

As everyone knows, Chen Ke wore many hats: politician, philosopher, revolutionary, military strategist, writer, chemist, physicist, medical scientist... and psychologist. During his lifetime, he wrote The Life of *** for several individuals — assessments that were fair, penetrating directly to the heart of the matter, neither distorting nor denigrating, but simply telling the truth. And then the subject of each assessment would die within a remarkably short time — more effective than any curse. It is said that both Hitler and Stalin, on their deathbeds, expressed the hope that Chen Ke would be the one to evaluate their lives, as they did not trust anyone else to do it properly. This claim is very likely apocryphal, but it does prove that Chen Ke's ability in this regard was universally acknowledged. Countless people who hated him eagerly awaited the chance to return the favor. One-third of these people were eliminated by Chen Ke. One-third failed to outlive him and died first. The remaining third, before they could even put pen to paper, found that Chen Ke had already departed peacefully — as decisively, as devoid of lingering attachment, as the unstoppable forward march of his entire life.

Some say Chen Ke was a ruthless man — that Hitler and Stalin were nothing compared to him. This is somewhat of an exaggeration, yet it is not without merit. He was precisely this kind of person: he would never give an enemy the chance to mock or retaliate. Compared to him, Hitler — who ordered his own body burned — was ruthless enough, to be sure, but that was merely the desperation of destruction, far less composed and elegant than the manner of Chen Ke's exit.

This book, one might say, is its own version of On the Life of Chen Ke. But for all its hundreds of thousands of words, it may still fall short of the comprehensiveness and precision Chen Ke achieved in those essays of a few thousand words each — the kind that could make even the subject nod in grudging agreement.

To evaluate a man's life, one must inevitably discuss his origins and background. But in Chen Ke's case, even this becomes an intractable problem. He appeared suddenly in southern China in 1905, and from that moment onward unleashed a ferocious revolutionary tempest — like the monkey in Chinese mythology who burst forth from a stone and turned the world upside down. To this day, no one has determined where he truly came from. Based on various speculations and rumors, he was very likely a scion of the Manchu imperial family — a man who led an uprising to overthrow the dynasty his own ancestors had built, and who then coldly ordered the imperial tombs of every Qing emperor excavated. Well — this is truly the most jaw-dropping absurdist drama imaginable. As they say, reality is always stranger than fiction.

This book devotes little space to Chen Ke's origins. To go further would transform this biography into a novel. I trust that every reader has heard the rumors. The author knows nothing more reliable than those rumors, so it is best to simply move on.

Chen Ke's enterprise was steeped in blood from the very beginning, a fact he made no effort to conceal — he even took a measure of pride in it, because he believed that the destruction of China's traditional social order was itself an extraordinarily great undertaking. This is also one of the points for which he is most frequently attacked: he redefined the standards of good and evil, measuring a person no longer by individual morality but by political stance. This was radically at odds with standards that had prevailed for thousands of years of human civilization and became the root of much confusion. Some exploited this to commit crimes, others exploited it to attack him, and he continued to go his own way, even uttering words that many consider supremely cold-blooded: "Since when has there been a revolution without bloodshed?"

This man of unyielding resolve, leading a band of like-minded comrades and driven by the spirit of immense self-sacrifice, began from Fengyang after the great floods and, step by step, stirred the winds of the world. By the tenth year of his revolution, he had already become the head of China's most powerful political force. The land revolution he championed spread like a plague in every direction, and no one could stop it. All of China fell into his hands.

And then the Western world's nightmare began.

Under Chen Ke's leadership, China — this ancient Central Kingdom — surged with renewed vitality. Industry and agriculture grew at staggering speeds. In a mere twenty years, national strength increased more than tenfold. In all of human history, no economy had ever achieved such speed and efficiency. More importantly, behind this breakneck economic growth lay an extremely narrow wealth gap and remarkably little social injustice. Chen Ke reshaped everything about this nation through sheer will and political acumen. The country that had still been wearing queues and smoking opium transformed, in a single generation, into a modern nation of civilizational confidence — and that transformation would endure for decades more.

The Second World War completely restructured the global order — and transformed China with it. While the West's impression of China still lingered in the Boxer Rebellion era, tens of millions of Chinese soldiers, armed to the teeth, had already prepared to take on the entire world. The proud and arrogant Western gentlemen were routed in humiliating fashion and forced to bow their noble heads. When the second half of the twentieth century arrived, a new world hegemon reigned supreme. He was of the yellow race, and he wore the face of a Chinese man.

The Kaiser's prophecy of a Yellow Peril seemed to have come true. Europe, under the shadow of the Soviet threat, lived in constant dread, seeking only self-preservation. The United States, shaken by China's power and ferocity, contracted its influence to avoid the edge of the blade. Marx's prophecy of capitalism's doom was becoming reality. The entire world was about to be engulfed in red.

At seventy, Chen Ke's body had inevitably begun to fail, but his mind remained sharp and agile. When the Chinese — having steamrolled every great power in their path — drew their swords, looked around, and found themselves adrift in a fog of uncertainty, he had already coolly formulated his next plan. Over the following decade, the People's Party — the most powerful ruling body in Chinese history — was subjected to an unprecedented purge. The architect of this purge was none other than the group's own founder, the leader they worshipped as a god: Chen Ke.

For China's bureaucrats, Chen Ke was an eternal, inescapable nightmare. They owed their very positions to his earth-shattering founding of the nation, and they suffered his merciless torment for it. This old man — who spent his entire life in perpetual revolution — used his indomitable spirit first to blaze a new path for his country and people, then to conquer new territory, and finally to install a failsafe for them all. Revolution needs leaders, but leaders also need deterrence. Once Chen Ke had fulfilled both of these missions, he could at last step down in good conscience.

The year 1970 arrived swiftly. Chen Ke had ruled this nation for half a century. Though his body was no longer what it once was, he remained sharp-eyed and vigorous. Just as everyone was speculating whether this strongman might break through the hundred-year mark, he abruptly let go. The event unfolded with shocking suddenness, and Chen Ke's daughter played a significant role. That very year, she and her youngest son perished in a plane crash. The devastated Chen Ke deteriorated at astonishing speed. Barely a month later, the old man who had seemed as though he would never fall closed his eyes. As he departed, his face even wore an expression of relief.

Chen Ke's funeral was solemn and grand. Over half a century, the people had long grown accustomed to his presence. The old man had given his entire life to this country, yet the people were not prepared to relieve him of his burden — they still clung to the hope of advancing safely under his protection. But had he not done enough for his people? He had given them sound institutions, a prosperous economy, a civilized way of thinking, a comfortable life, and a free spirit. Now it was time for them to navigate and forge ahead on their own.

Fortunately, the results seem to have been acceptable. With the strongman's departure, China inevitably underwent certain changes. Bureaucratic power grew stronger — but the failsafe was still in place, and the deterrence remained. The small incident I described above is one example.

I once heard an anecdote while in China. Ten years ago, during the filming of the movie Genesis, finding an actor to play Chen Ke proved agonizing — one who could capture both the look and the spirit. They finally found someone, and when he walked out in full makeup, several old generals who had come to inspect the production could not hold back their tears. They said they had seen Chairman Chen.

Even though those purges remained too painful to recall, even though Chen Ke had reshaped them with ruthless dispassion, even though they had reverted to old habits after his death — Chen Ke was still Chen Ke. He had become not only a totem among ordinary Chinese people but also a banner within the People's Party itself. This man, who single-handedly pulled the Chinese nation back from the abyss of oblivion — no matter the slander he faces, no matter how many people curse him — remains the unshakeable guide. His ideas and deeds have exerted a profound influence on the entire world. Countless people have become his devotees and disciples. Countless people have exhausted themselves studying him. Countless people have been bewitched by his charisma. Countless people have been humbled by his character. He was simply that kind of man. He was Chen Ke.

Before such a person, language itself seems pale and insufficient. We can only pray that this book comes a little closer to the truth — though that is every bit as difficult as accurately describing God.

— Ren Wu'ai Sinuo, July 12, 2000