Developing areas of the world in recent years have increasingly recognized opportunities must be made available to improve the quality of rural life before healthy progress can be achieved. In the search for tested formulas and skills to rouse rural citizens to active participation in their communities, JAMES YEN and the mass reconstruction movements he and his colleagues have authored were in the lead.

YEN YANG-CHU was born on October 26, 1893, at Pachou, Szechuan Province, China. The son of a scholar family, his early life and training conformed to the pattern of the gentry, remote from the people. After a traditional education in the ancient classics, he attended schools in Chengtu, Szechuan and the British Colony of Hong Kong to take up "Western learning." Continuing his studies in the United States, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1918.

In college, a close English friend, James Stuart, helped him with English and YEN taught his friend Chinese and gave him his Chinese name. Later, learning that Stuart had been killed in France during the early part of World War I, YEN adopted his friend's Christian name as his own in memory of the "brother" he had lost.

Immediately after graduation in 1918, he volunteered through the National War Work Council of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) to do welfare work among the 200,000 Chinese laboring behind the Allied lines. Assigned to a labor corps of 5,000 at Boulogne, in northern France, he for the first time came to know and respect the lively humor, industry and courage of his less fortunate countrymen. Despite their bitter lives and illiteracy, he found them often shrewd, with practical common sense and sometimes profound judgments on what they saw around them.

Homesick and eager for news, the laborers deluged him with requests for help in writing letters to their families. Studying what they wanted to say and the replies received, he discovered that only a small vocabulary was needed to communicate their fears, hopes and simple wants. As no textbooks in Chinese had been devised for simple literacy, he worked out a vocabulary of 1,000 most commonly used characters and began to teach. The first group of 40 student-laborers taught others. To give "graduates" a useful application of their new knowledge, he started a paper printed in Paris which he called the Chinese Laborer's Weekly, written largely in the basic characters. One laborer contributed his savings to help finance the paper, fearing that it would have to close because the price of one centime per copy was "so little." The results achieved in less than a year among the 25- to 50-year-old laborers so moved him that YEN resolved to dedicate his life to the education and development of fellow Chinese who had no opportunity for schooling.

Eager to get on with this work, he completed requirements for his Master's Degree in one academic year at Princeton University and, in 1920, returned to China to start on mass education with the National Committee of the YMCA in Shanghai. The 1,000 characters he had selected in France were arranged in four books that sold for the equivalent of 12 U.S. cents a set, each containing 24 lessons and presenting 10 characters per lesson with a drawing and exercises in reading and composition. By learning one lesson a day, the basic vocabulary could be mastered in less than four months. YEN also organized a committee to review his list of elementary characters, which, after a four year study, chose from a word count of over one million a revised list of 1,300 characters that were used in later editions of the readers. Eventually, a "People's Library" of some 1,000 booklets was produced in this basic Chinese on such topics as the lives of great men and women of Chinese history, translations of Confucian classics, folk tales and songs, simple and practical modern farming methods, rural hygiene, cooperatives and democratic citizenship.

Experiments were undertaken simultaneously in nine provinces, so that the results could be compared as to the number taught in a year, the cost per pupil, initial enrollment, continuity of attendance and length of time to complete the course. Changsha, in Hunan Province, was one of the first "battlegrounds" where, in 1922, YEN and his associates began a campaign to create what they called a "climate of willingness to go to school." They printed and placed prominently on walls of public gathering places 1,500 posters picturing China hindered by ignorance and distributed thousands of handbills urging education. The Governor posted on street corners 500 proclamations that the people must learn to read. A law was passed taxing illiterates, from which exemption could be obtained only by passing an examination in the 1,300 characters. There were meetings of shopkeepers, mass meetings and a general parade of college and middle school students bearing banners exhorting the people to cure China's blindness by learning to read. Eighty teachers, each with at least three years experience, were recruited from government, mission and private schools and given only the equivalent of four U.S. dollars a month for ricksha fare. Seventy-five teams then visited shops, homes and people in the streets and in three afternoons 1,400-persons volunteered to study, including ricksha pullers, scavengers, fuel gatherers and peddlers. Attending classes held one hour a day in 60 places, sometimes with two classes under one roof, 1,200 students finished the course and 967 passed the examinations. The average cost was equivalent to 50 U.S. cents per pupil.

As a result of the successful demonstrations of the literacy campaign, a National Association of the Mass Education Movement (MEM) was organized, in 1923, at a congress in Peking attended by 500 delegates from 21 provinces and special districts. The congress drew up a program, adopted a budget and provided for establishment of a headquarters. Thereafter, the Movement spread rapidly; branch organizations were created throughout the country and local campaigns were well developed in Hunan, Hupeh, Kiangsu and Kwangtung Provinces. Sales of the readers by the Shanghai Commercial Press, printers to the Movement, reached six million and another three million were sold through the YMCA. By 1931, an estimated five million students had attended MEM classes and over 100,000 men and women were teaching daily without compensation in rural and urban schools.

YEN and his colleagues, meanwhile, had become convinced that literacy was not enough in itself but must be related to a broader program of life-betterment in the natural environment. Since eight out of 10 Chinese lived in villages, they decided to go to the village. Turning the extensive literacy campaign over to others, they began, in 1930, to concentrate on intensive study of rural life in one hsien, or county. Chosen for their "laboratory" was Ting Hsien, in Hopeh Province, a typical North China county some distance south of Peking, with a population of 400,000 living in tamped earth houses on average farmlands. To combat the four basic problems of the Chinese peasantry, defined by YEN and his fellow "research-students" as ignorance, disease, poverty and civic inertia, an integrated fourfold scheme of rural reconstruction was developed comprised of education, public health, economic improvement, and self-government. For this correlated program—a forerunner of present community development efforts in Asia the Chinese term for "reconstruction," meaning "change" and "build," was taken as most descriptive of their goal; their aim was to change not only physical environment and social institutions but especially the people themselves and build anew on a revitalized foundation. They sought to reach the people through the school, home and community, not to superimpose new ideas but to gain the people's participation. In their 10-year plan, the goal in the first three years was to eliminate illiteracy among the 80,000 young men and women between the ages of 20 and 25. In the second three-year period effort was to be concentrated on agricultural and economic reconstruction and in the third period of four years on development of village self-government and citizen training.

Graduates of the literacy classes, called People's Schools, were given the title "literate citizens" and organized into Fellow-Scholar Associations, each one to teach others. The Farmer, China's first rural newspaper, was developed. The hunger of new literates for vital, appealing reading matter and their response to this paper and the People's Library the MEM was building prompts YEN to stress today the urgent need for a new literature for readers with limited literacy, which only the Communists are systematically supplying.

Other than the regular literacy classes, the teaching program at Ting Hsien was adapted to the farmer's calendar. When it was cotton-planting time, improved cotton seed was introduced. During the winter months when farmers were idle, emphasis was on village industries and the organization of marketing and credit cooperatives. A farmer who developed a more productive hybrid strain of wheat was made a demonstrator, and himself promoted its extension. Farmers were shown the difference between ordinary pigs and chickens and crossbreeds and how to improve their own stock. As a result of better seeds, smut control, fatter pigs, more eggs per hen and cooperatives, the income of Ting Hsien farmers nearly doubled in five years. Health services were established at each of the three administrative levels in the hsien. A District Health Center housed a 50-bed hospital, a laboratory, administrative offices and classrooms. Sub-District Health Stations were each manned by a qualified "B-Grade" physician and a dresser or nurse. And Village Health Workers, who were members of the People's School Alumni Associations of their villages and trained at the Sub-District Health Stations, recorded births and deaths; vaccinated their villages against smallpox; reconstructed their own wells, as a demonstration, according to an approved design to reduce danger of surface pollution; gave simple treatments according to the facilities of their "First Aid Boxes," each containing 10 safe drugs; introduced to the Sub-District Health Station patients whose ailments were beyond their scope; and served as "health extension agents." Preventive medicine was demonstrated continuously, and epidemic outbreaks were used to prove the value of inoculation and isolation. Projects in self-government included reorganization of the local administration, land registration, a population census, and organization of a People's Militia.

The "Ting Hsien Experiment" for the first time attracted from metropolitan centers former university presidents, professors, physicians and highly educated agricultural technicians to join in rural work. The MEM previously had "retrained" scholars who could not see how literature could be "prostituted" to such low levels that even peasants could read. In Ting Hsien again, reeducating the educated to humble themselves and learn from the people the needs and wants to which their skills had to be adapted proved one of the thorniest problems. Though these intellectuals voluntarily had left their comfortable positions and moved to mud houses with the farmers, they had great difficulty bringing their knowledge down to a practical level and developing techniques and improvements that were both simple to learn and economical. Deciding that special training was needed for service in the rural areas, YEN was instrumental in founding the Hopeh Provincial Institute of Political and Social Reconstruction, which he served as president.

Two other demonstration areas were developed in south and west China and, by 1937, when the Japanese invaded the north, over 800 rural reconstruction centers had been established by MEM-trained workers. Though the 10-year plan could not be completed at Ting Hsien, valorous and strong resistance by the people there throughout the long war to come proved the success of the MEM effort "to create citizens through education." The outbreak of hostilities caused the disbandment of some branches of the Movement, but much of the literacy work was taken over by the Central Government People's Military Training Corps and otherwise continued on its own momentum, as in Kweilin where middle school students taught their elders while they were crowded in caves during bombing raids. In 1938, the Central Government also took over the Kiangsi Provincial College of Education at Wusih, founded with MEM guidance, which had a department of agricultural extension and one for adult education, where literacy campaigns were an important activity.

In the emergency, JAMES YEN offered his services to the Central Government and, in 1938, became Director of the Hunan Provincial School of Public Administration at Changsha, charged with the task of mobilizing and training some 5,000 civil servants and 30,000 village heads for "resistance and reconstruction." At the request of the Provincial Governor, YEN and a group of his former co-workers also helped reorganize Hunan's 75 county governments following the Ting Hsien pattern. Dividing the province with its population of some 30 million into three regions, they gave six weeks concentrated training to magistrates, bureau heads and village elders in the area where attack was expected first. Six months were allowed for training in the second region and one year in the third. This work was well under way when the Japanese advance forced abandonment of the effort and withdrawal further west to Szechuan.

It was in Peipei, outside of China's wartime capital of Chungking, that the MEM came to its fullest fruition on mainland China. Despite repeated bombings and other hardships, evident progress was achieved during the trying period of hostilities and in the three years immediately following. By 1949, Peipei was well known as a model county with a model government, by the magistrate's account a result of the MEM influence. From their central office and modest living quarters built of the same material as the farmers' houses, workers daily fanned out through the county and into neighboring counties, conducting classes of many kinds, including literacy for adults—here "each one teach one" was in effective practice—first aid and sanitation, sewing, weaving, and papermaking. Good farmers and youth groups ran crop, piggery and poultry demonstrations at several locations around the hsien. The workers helped farmers improve their houses with sturdier construction and larger windows; they introduced improved but simple tools. Informal discussions on history and government among the young people and adults were regular features. The College of Rural Reconstruction, established at Peipei in 1940 with JAMES YEN as president, received contributions from all provincial governments of Free China along with requests for trained leaders to carry out economic and social reconstruction. Excepting a few basic liberal arts classes, instruction was adapted in the College to the needs of the rural people and directly related to actual field practice. The Communist takeover in Szechuan in late 1949 caused the termination of this second effort to provide special schooling for rural workers before its influence could be widely felt.

Financial support for the MEM depended largely upon JAMES YEN’s convincing personal commitment and his persuasive eloquence. A major source of funds after 1930 were private contributions which he raised in the United States. In China, in addition to government assistance, he also raised substantial sums for the Movement from wealthy individuals. In late 1946, Dr. YEN’s urgent appeal to Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek for attention to rural development "fell on deaf ears—the Generalissimo was determined first to defeat the Communists in the civil war."

In 1947, Dr. YEN declined an invitation to head the United Nations [Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Fundamental Education Program for Southeast Asia, which an MEM representative had assisted in formulating, in order to carry forward his work in China. In that year, he went instead to the United States to enlist the support of friends in and outside of government for application of a program of mass education and rural reconstruction on a national scale for China's peasant millions ravaged by eight years of war. To legislation enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1948 to implement the Marshall Plan in China, he persuaded leading legislators to add a rider specifying that 10 per cent of the aid appropriation be used for a rural program to be administered by a five-member commission composed of three Chinese and two Americans. The approach subsequently adopted by this Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), of which he was named a member by the President of China, borrowed much from the MEM pattern. Looking to the MEM for trainees, the JCRR, in early 1949, made a grant of some one million dollars from its fund of US$27.5 million to the MEM for specific purposes, a large portion of which was allotted for expansion of the College of Rural Reconstruction. Though the JCRR had only a year to operate on the mainland, its projects in agriculture, irrigation, education, cooperatives, public health and land tenure reform reached an estimated 60 million Chinese and, since 1949, the Commission has been the guiding force in a notably successful rural revolution on Taiwan.

Taking the view that there was enough other expertise in the JCRR for Taiwan's needs, Dr. YEN, in 1950, resigned from the Commission. In 1951, in support of their belief that techniques evolved over 30 years in one Asian country might be useful elsewhere, he and friends in the United States formed in New York the International Mass Education Movement. Included on the International MEM Board, over which JAMES YEN presided, were Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Justice William O. Douglas, DeWitt Wallace, owner and publisher of Reader's Digest, Pearl S. Buck and other leaders in education and industry. On behalf of this group, Dr. YEN, in 1952, made an exploratory trip through parts of Latin America and Asia to find an all-out testing ground for extension of the concepts developed through the MEM and to study the possibility of establishing an international center where leaders from cooperating countries could be trained in rural reconstruction. In the Philippines, his visit inspired a group of civic leaders to organize the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM) to carry out a program that would assist in raising the economic and social standard of the rural people who represent 80 per cent of the population. Presenting to his Board in New York, in early 1954, a proposal to help sustain this new effort, he said: "The problems in the Philippines are typical of Asia as a whole. It is not too large, and, therefore, striking results can be produced quickly. Also, the Philippines is blessed with abundant resources, a responsive people, four centuries of Christian heritage, and, in President Magsaysay, a forceful leader close to the masses."

Whereas financing for the PRRM at first came mainly from American gifts raised by Dr. YEN, the International MEM today is matching local subscriptions. A non-sectarian, non-political and entirely Filipino organization, the PRRM Board includes some of the nation's outstanding leaders in education, business, banking and social welfare, with Dr. YEN serving as advisor. Effort first was concentrated in several municipalities of Nueva Ecija in Central Luzon, where the insurgent Hukbalahaps had developed support among aggrieved tenant farmers. In 1954, the program was extended to the municipality of Marikina, Rizal and to Pampanga, where the PRRM was invited by President Ramon Magsaysay to administer his rehabilitation project at San Luis in cooperation with Army engineers. A further expansion, in 1957, included pilot communities in Laguna, Batangas and Bulacan Provinces. Using the MEM approach of an integrated program but assuming no pat answers, the PRRM is still evolving techniques that will bring "not relief but release" to the rural people. Literacy advancement has been paced by improvement in living conditions. Sanitary toilets and blind drainage ditches under kitchens were early introductions in pilot barrios. Health clinics stand where none existed and newly-trained auxiliary health workers give first aid between visits of government rural health units. A livelihood project for minimum additional income, consisting of Masagana rice culture, secondary crops, piggery, poultry and backyard gardening, has enabled PRRM-trained farmers to increase their income by 50 to 100 per cent in Nueva Ecija. A variety of vocational projects have taught women such skills as dressmaking, tailoring and preserving of food and men hollow block making. Combining the best of the old practices with simple new methods, farmers have learned to mulch citrus trees, smudge mangoes and spray with insecticides more systematically. By sharing in the management of PRRM projects through farmers' schools, youth groups and women's clubs, villagers have gained experience in running their own community affairs. Regular "self-government seminars" are conducted for village people and their barrio councilors.

PRRM workers now must be college graduates. Before assignment to a barrio, their six months training emphasizes technical and social "know-how" and missionary spirit, and, as multiple-service village workers, all receive instruction in the four fundamentals of rural reconstruction—education, health, livelihood and self-government. Posted prominently on the wall of every PRRM project are its guiding principles:

Go to the people

Live among them

Learn from them

Love them

Serve them Plan with them

Start with what they know

Build on what they have.

Today the Philippine Government is sponsoring a national community development effort begun in 1955 as well as the farm improvement and animal husbandry work of the Bureau of Agricultural Extension, the rural health units of the Bureau of Public Health, and the community school program of the Bureau of Public Schools, which Bureau was the pioneer of rural development in the archipelago. Of the several private groups supplementing these Government agencies, the PRRM is making a singular and important contribution by studying needs and evaluating trial solutions and results in a search for more effective means of improving life in the rural areas. Also, its continuous training program has provided workers for other community development organizations while some have gone back to their home barrios to put their new knowledge to work independently.

Last year, Dr. YEN set out again to raise more money for financing a new college, to be called the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), for students from the Philippines and other developing countries. Fifty hectares (one hectare equals 2.47 acres) have been purchased in Silang, Cavite, and a three-year construction program is scheduled soon to begin. A tribute to the founder's dauntless, fighting spirit will be this third attempt to institutionalize the training of selected men and women who would form a professional rural reconstruction corps.

The ideas Dr. YEN and his colleagues tested in the MEM and JCRR in China have gained adherents in Burma, where a program initiated by the Government patterned its name and broad approach after the MEM. Similarly, those who developed the Etawah project, a model for other community development in India, used the MEM experience as their guide. For these and like efforts in other countries, Dr. YEN envisages a mutually beneficial relationship through the IIRR.

Through the years of struggle, disappointment and achievement, Dr. YEN’s wife, the former Alice M. Huie, has been his active helpmate. While raising their family of three sons and two daughters, she has shared in village work, living gracefully in the modest quarters her husband has insisted upon so as to create no gulf between staff and villagers with whom they work.

In recognition of his service to humanity, honorary degrees have been conferred upon Dr. YEN by six universities, including his alma mater; Yale. In May 1943, he was chosen with Albert Einstein and John Dewey as one of the world's 10 outstanding "modern pioneers of science" by representatives of over 100 universities during the 400th Anniversary of Copernicus in New York's Carnegie Hall. In 1948, he was cited by the East West Association for serving the cause of new and greater understanding between peoples of the world.

In Southeast Asia, where Chinese are sometimes resented for the economic leverage they exercise, he has come, free from selfish influences, with his wealth of experience and with funds he has himself raised abroad to help in the urgent task of rural development. His conviction is expressed in an arresting question: "Why shouldn't we in every country who share a faith in our own people band together as allies and fight against the common foes?"

August 1960
Manila

REFERENCES:

Buck, Pearl S. Tell the People, New York, John Day, 1945.

Ch'en C.C. "Scientific Medicine as Applied in Ting Hsien," Division of Public Health Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, Annual Report, 1933.

______ . "Development of Systematic Training in Rural Public Health," ibid. 1935.

Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, Annual Reports, 1948-1950.

Laubach, Frank C. The Silent Billion Speak, Westwood, New Jersey, Fleming Revell, 1959.

______. Teaching the World to Read; a Handbook of Literacy Campaigns, New York, Friendship Press, 1947.

McEvoy, J.P. "Jimmy Yen and the People’s Crusade," Reader’s Digest, March 1955.

Yen, Y.C. James. The Ting Hsien Experiment, Peiping, National Association of the Mass Education Movement, 1934.

Philippines Free Press, articles on PRRM, 1948-1950.