Yen, Y. C. James
(1890–1990) Chinese reformer. Born in the mountains of China's Sichuan Province in 1890, the young Y. C. James Yen (Yan Yangchu) was sent to mission schools, where he became, in his later words, not a "Christian" (implying membership in a foreign institution) but "a follower of Christ." After studying at Hong Kong University, Yen graduated in 1918 from Yale University and worked under the International Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) with the Chinese Labor Corps in France. While there, he wrote a widely copied literacy primer that used one thousand basic Chinese characters.
Yen returned to China in 1921 to head a national mass literacy campaign under the Chinese National YMCA and to marry Alice Huie, an American-born Chinese with whom he had three sons and two daughters. He adapted the publicity and organization techniques of the YMCA's science education campaigns and combined them with the traditional village-school concepts of nonprofessionalized teachers, neighborhood classes, and flexible schedules to produce a campaign (yundong) model used in hundreds of localities that attracted more than five million students. In 1923, Yen and other leading intellectuals formed the National Association of Mass Education Movements (MEM).
Still, most illiterates lived in villages; nor was literacy their fundamental problem. In 1926, the MEM set up a village campaign in Ding Xian, a county some two hundred miles south of Beijing. Rejecting the radical approach, Yen saw "farmers," not "peasants," in need of education and support, not class war. In 1928, Yen received an honorary graduate degree from Yale, raised a substantial endowment in the United States, and then enlisted socially conscious specialists to develop a fourfold program in rural reconstruction. The Ting Hsien (Ding Xian) Experiment used people's schools to coordinate innovations ranging from hybrid pigs and economic cooperatives to village drama and village health workers. By 1931, these successes excited nationwide public and government interest. Yen joined Liang Shuming and other independent reformers to form a National Rural Reconstruction Movement comprising hundreds of organizations. The 1937 Japanese invasion drove MEM operations first to Hunan, then to Sichuan, but Yen spent much of the war in Washington, D.C. After 1945, Yen found himself increasingly at odds with the Nationalist government's military preoccupation; in 1948 he persuaded the U.S. Congress to fund an independent Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, of which he became one of the commissioners. After 1949, Yen led the Philippines Rural Reconstruction Movement and founded the International Rural Reconstruction Movement, which he headed until his death in New York City in the fall of 1990.
Further Reading
Hayford, Charles W. (1990) To the People: James Yen and Village China. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sun Enrong, ed. (1980) Yan Yangchu Quanji (Works of Yan Yangchu). 4 vols. Changsha, China: Hunan jiaoyu.
Wu Hsiang-hsiang. (1981) Yan Yangchu Zhuan (Biography of Yan Yangchu). Taipei, Taiwan: Shibao wenhua.
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