Abstract: Hunan province suffered serious disasters year after year during Chen Baozhen’s governor career. He always engaged in social relief and his relief work was carried out around his ideas of social relief. Chen Bao-zhen’s social relief thoughts were mainly composed of compassionate relief，assistance relief，replacement relief and encouragement relief. Chen Bozhen’s relief thinking not only inherited Chinese traditional relief ideas，but was also refined in his actual relief experience in many years. The implementation of Chen Baozhen’s social relief thoughts was necessary in Hunan and these thoughts had important practical significance and profound historic value. However，the actual effects of his social relief thoughts were not ideal due to the internal and external historic conditions of the late Qing dynasty.