Chen Chi-li was born in 1943 and came to Taiwan with his family as a child. In the late 1950s he joined the Bamboo Union, a gang of mainlander youths, and went on to lead it.

In 1984 the Defence Ministry's Intelligence Bureau recruited him for the task of "punishing" the Chinese-American writer Henry Liu. He took Wu Tun and Tung Kuei-sen to the United States, and on 15 October they shot Liu dead in Daly City, California. Before leaving he recorded a tape explaining that the mission came from the Intelligence Bureau and left it with someone for safekeeping — a gangster's insurance against the state.

That November the police launched a nationwide crackdown code-named Operation Clean Sweep, and he was arrested. His people promptly released the tape, and an assassination carried out abroad was exposed by those who had carried it out. In 1985 he was sentenced to life, as was the bureau's director, Wang Hsi-ling.

His sentence was reduced and he was released in 1991. When the government launched another large crackdown in 1996 he left for Cambodia and lived in Phnom Penh from then on. He died of cancer in Hong Kong in 2007, aged sixty-four; his body was brought back to Taipei for a funeral attended by thousands of gang members dressed in black.