I have been provisioning rich text content to content editor web parts for years now and every time you have to get this done – you have to convert your special characters into encoded values otherwise the stuff won’t work.
I never asked myself if there is any other way to do it … turns out there is. Marc Irawan get’s a credit for this one … here it goes.

So the problem why you can’t have < and > in your provisioning XML is because the XML treats those as exit characters and as a result you will get a broken CEWP provisioned to your page; this means having something like this in your provisioning XML:

<WebPart…>
…
<Content xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2/ContentEditor”>
<a href=”http://google.com”>Google</a>
</Content>
…
</WebPart>

… will result in a broken web part being provisioned

but renaming all the special characters in XML is not only cumbersome but also makes them unreadable later; and hard to update too!

The solution is this:

Try it and you’ll never look back!

Check out Yaroslav Pentsarskyy  blog ShareMuch for more insightfull content.