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Description area
Dates of existence
History
Samuel Chinque (Chen Tian Sheng) was born in 1908 in Kingston, Jamaica. On the death of his mother Samuel and his father moved to China and at the age of 18 he became a merchant seaman and discovered socialism as a result of his struggle to improve his fellow sailors' pay and working conditions.
Samuel eventually settled in Liverpool as the British-based representative of the Chinese Seamen's Union. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935. After setting up the Anti-Japan Salvation Front during the Second World War he found himself in conflict with the Chinese Government and this convinced him to join China's Communist revolutionaries.
With Britain's entry into the war he joined the Liverpool Fire Brigade and served as an auxiliary firefighter and union activist. After the war he became an informal rallying-point for seamen, revolutionaries and students from the Chinese diaspora. Among his visitors were prominent Chinese revolutionaries who suggested that he move to London to establish the Kung Ho Chinese Mutual Aid Association. They also invited him, in 1947, to head the first overseas branch of China's Hsinhua News Agency.
Hsinhua was at that time the only British-based organisation to represent, and speak for, the People's Republic of China and its Communist Party. As such it became a model for successive branches opened around the world. Hsinhua remained active in its Chancery Lane home until Chinque's retirement in the 1980s when it moved to Swiss Cottage, North London.
Chinque was a member of the negotiating team that lobbied the postwar UK government to re-establish trade between Britain and China. In 1963 he was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain after refusing to endorse the anti-Chinese position adopted by former Sovier premier Nikita Khruschev; he consequently joined the Chinese Communist Party.
Samuel Chinque continued to run the Hsinhua agency until he was 74 and he remained a formidable and charismatic figure in London's Chinese community well into his old age. He died in 2004.