Word: hua
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Hua Chung is a Chinese refugee university. Driven from Wuchang to Kweilin by Japanese bombers, it now carries on deep in the hills of southern Yunnan Prov ince. From that inflation-blighted remote ness, a Chinese-American couple recently sent the U.S. an eye-opening report. It appears in the current Atlantic Monthly...
...Hua Chung it is impossible to buy a book or subscribe to a periodical. Most of the students do not own a single textbook...
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...