Education: China’s Yen

Whatever eventually happens to Basic English, Basic Chinese is a sensational success. Since 1930 it has enabled 46,000,000 Chinese, who otherwise might have stayed illiterate, to read & write. The man who put Basic Chinese across, lithe and lively James (“Jimmy”) Yang Ch’u Yen lit momentarily last week in New York, Providence, Washington. Jimmy Yen moves fast: at 49 he has fomented an almost incredible cultural revolution, and hopes he has just begun.

Jimmy Yen is organizing postwar plans for China. To many a Chinese he is more important than generals or cabinet ministers. In any case, he speaks for the Ping-min Chiao-yu, the Mass Education Movement which he founded and directs, and which revolutionized Chinese education by using Basic Chinese.

While Basic English with its 850 words (TIME, Sept. 20) is intended mainly for international communication, Basic Chinese (TIME, Oct. 4) is primarily for Chinese. It consists of 1,000 characters (words) most commonly used by plain people, selected from the 40,000-odd available characters. It can be learned in 96 hours from four little books. Chinese coolies and peasants (85% of the population) now need only bestir themselves a bit to become literate. Jimmy Yen sees to it that they stir increasingly.

Boulogne Beginnings. Jimmy’s ancestors were old-fashioned scholars. In the Mission School of Western Learning at Pao-ning, he studied science, geography, history, English and Christianity. After his Hong-Kong Edward VII Scholarship blew up because he was not a British subject, Jimmy was reduced to going to Yale (’18) and Princeton (M.A. ’20). After graduating from Yale he went to France for the Y.M.C.A., worked in a Boulogne canteen for 5,000 coolies of a military labor battalion. These workers kept Jimmy busy writing their letters home, reading newspapers to them.

Back in China the philosopher Hu Shih (later Ambassador to the U.S.) had taken to writing in Pai-hua or spoken Chinese (as contrasted with written Chinese, called Wen-li). But even this could be read only by other scholars—the people at large were still illiterate.

Jimmy analyzed the letters he wrote for his coolies, found a vocabulary of about 1,000 Pai-hua characters sufficient to write all of them. Then he called a mass meeting. When he told the coolies they could do what coolies had never done, only 40 agreed to take a lesson. After four months they could write a letter, read news, and soon the canteen was a nightly humbuzz of coolies studying Basic Chinese aloud. Jimmy went to Paris to show other Chinese camp agents what he had learned about teaching coolies.

China now had a linguistic instrument which could help rebuild the nation. But the literate coolie veterans of the war had next to nothing to read. So Jimmy set out to create a plain people’s literature in Pai-hua. The peasants were generally skeptical, but eventually Jimmy’s revolution spread to thousands of centers. In addition to reading and writing,many of these centers teach public health, improved economic ways, civics. They are an integral part of the new national educational system. Jimmy became an adviser to Chiang Kaishek, many a night of whose sleep he ruined with exciting visions of a China reconstructed by mass education.

Fiery Dignity. Jimmy Yen is a couple of fellows. In his face is the ineffable dignity, the fruit of 4,000 years of culture which Bertrand Russell found in the face of every Chinese, even the unlettered. But when Jimmy Yen speaks he is the essence of will, exploding off his seat, talking even to a one-man audience like an evangelist under a big top. Jimmy thinks the great Chinese civilized tradition will blossom gorgeously on the basis of a decent material life. Declares Jimmy Yen: “Confucius says you can rob an army of its general but you cannot rob the least of men of his will.”