Ting Hsien Experiment
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The Ding Xian Experiment () during the Republican period of Chinese history was a project in Rural Reconstruction sponsored by James Yen's
Mass Education Movement Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementa ...
(MEM) 中华平民教育促进会 in
Ding Xian Dingzhou, or Tingchow in Postal Map Romanization, and formerly called Ding County or Dingxian, is a county-level city in the prefecture-level city of Baoding, Hebei Province. As of 2009, Dingzhou had a population of 1.2 million. Dingzhou has 3 ...
(Ding County),
Hebei Hebei or , (; alternately Hopeh) is a northern province of China. Hebei is China's sixth most populous province, with over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. The province is 96% Han Chinese, 3% Manchu, 0.8% Hui, an ...
, some 200 miles south of Beijing. The project was started in 1926 and lasted until the Japanese invasion of 1937. The county was to be a social laboratory in which to develop and demonstrate ways to raise the standard of living, health, political responsibility, and culture of the Chinese village. Although the program received financial aid from the
Rockefeller Rockefeller is a German surname, originally given to people from the village of Rockenfeld near Neuwied in the Rhineland and commonly referring to subjects associated with the Rockefeller family. It may refer to: People with the name Rockefeller fa ...
and other American foundations, Yen and his team of experts aimed to develop affordable techniques and prototypes which could then be made productive all across China using mainly resources from within the village. They hoped to show that the causes of the extremely low standard of living in the Chinese countryside could be addressed by co-operation without class warfare and that violent revolution was not necessary to change village life. Through their work the reformers attempted to produce a way of modernizing the countryside based on local conditions rather than by importing prevailing methods and concepts of Western origins.


The program

In 1926, after developing successful literacy campaigns across the nation, mainly in cities, James Yen and the Mass Education Movement (MEM) decided to start programs in the countryside. The village of Zhaicheng, in Ding Xian (Ding County) in central Hebei, had started a program of local self-government nearly a decade before, and was chosen because of the welcome offered by village elders. The MEM started programs of literacy education, but in spite of original success, one villager explained to Yen, "Dr. Yen, I am grateful to know how to read, but my stomach is just as empty as my illiterate neighbor's." Yen realized that literacy, in fact, no one approach, could address the village's problems. He then identified the "Four Weaknesses" of China as "poverty, ignorance, disease, and misgovernment," and invited Chinese experts to come to live in Ding Xian and design experimental program to address each one of them: # The problem of "Ignorance" was to be addressed by village schools and cultural programs which included village drama. among others. # The problem of Poverty was to be addressed by farmers' cooperatives, improved agricultural techniques, seeds, and new breeds of plants and animals. # The problem of Health was addressed by a pyramidal structure in which Village Health Workers were trained to keep records, treat minor problems, give basic inoculations, and refer more serious cases to clinics in the market towns. # Politics. As the work expanded from Zhaicheng village to encompass most of Ding Country, the MEM saw greater and greater need to address political problems such as taxation, land ownership, and corruption. in 1932, the Hebei provincial government turned political control of the county over to the MEM, creating the Hebei Institute for Political and Social Reconstruction (IPSR). The work at Ding Xian attracted nationwide attention and developed many new techniques for rural development which did not depend on central government control, violent revolution, or large infusions of foreign money. The National Rural Reconstruction Movement held three national conferences involving several hundred government and private projects. James Yen and
Liang Shuming Liang Shuming (, Wade-Giles ''Liang Shu-ming''; sometimes ''Liang Sou-ming'', October 18, 1893 – June 23, 1988), born Liang Huanding (), courtesy name Shouming (), was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer in the Rural Reconstruct ...
were the most prominent leaders. Most of the rural reconstruction work was halted by the Japanese invasion of Hebei and North China in 1937. But even though reformers left the Ding Xian Experiment, villagers in Ding Xian kept up local government, schools, public health work, and agricultural work as had been intended when MEM programs were designed to be self-sustainable.


Notes


References and further reading

* * * * * * * {{cite book , last = Yen , first = Y. C. James , year = 1934 , title = The Ting Hsien Experiment , publisher = Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, location = Peiping , ref = none Reprints
WorldCat


External links


China Ding Xian
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Subject Page. 1930s in China