Like his new idols Kang and Liang, Chen decided to continue his studies in Japan.

There Chen became radicalized, cutting off his Qing-mandated queue, but was soon deported for aggressive behavior towards Qing agents in Japan. Back in China, he briefly joined an anti-Qing assassination squad. Chen soon decided, however, that China’s problems went deeper than the ruling dynasty. He returned to China to try and transform the Chinese way of thinking, to get at what he perceived as the root cause of China’s weakness.