China
James Yen
1890–1990 YMCA worker with the Chinese Labor Corps in France, 1918
Born in Bazhong, Sichuan, Yen graduated from Yale University in 1918. That year he went to France with the YMCA to work among the Chinese Labor Corps, laborers sent to support the Allies. At Boulogne, after writing letters home for illiterate men, he asked for volunteers willing to learn 1,000 basic characters, and he founded a Chinese Workers' Weekly printed in them. After graduate study at Princeton he returned to China and in 1923 helped form the National Association of Mass Education Movements. From 1926 he led rural reconstruction work at Ding Xian in Hebei, and from 1952 in the Philippines. He died in New York in January 1990.