Y.C. James "Jimmy" Yen

Y. C. James Yen (traditional Chinese: 晏陽初; simplified Chinese: 晏阳初; pinyin: Yàn Yángchū, 1890-1990). Yen, known to his many English speaking friends as "Jimmy," was a Chinese educator and organizer known for his work in mass literacy and rural reconstruction, first in China, then in many countries. After working with Chinese laborers in France during World War I, in the 1920s Yen first organized the National Association of Mass Education Movements to bring literacy to the Chinese masses, then turned to the villages of China to organize Rural Reconstruction, most famously at Ding Xian, (or, in the spelling of the time, Ting Hsien), a county in Hebei, from 1926-1937. He was instrumental in founding the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction in 1948, which then moved to Taiwan. In 1952, Dr. Yen organized the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement and in 1960, he established the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction. He returned to China in the 1980s but died in New York in 1990.

Born to a scholarly but not wealthy family in Bazhong, Sichuan, in 1890, Yen was sent to a school run by the China Inland Mission, studied at Hong Kong University, and graduated in 1918 from Yale University, where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi Fraternity. After graduation he went to France to join the work of the International YMCA with the Chinese Labor Corps in France workers who had been sent to support the Allies in World War I. Working with them to read and write letters, Yen recalled, he found "for the first time in my ignorant intellectual life" the value of the common people of his own country. What they lacked was education. Therefore, Yen wrote a widely copied literacy primer which used 1,000 basic characters.

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