Ding Xian Experiment

The Ding Xian Experiment (Chinese: 定縣實驗; pinyin: Dingxian shiyan; Wade–Giles: Ting Hsien shih-yan) during the Republican period of Chinese history was a project in Rural Reconstruction sponsored by James Yen's Mass Education Movement (MEM) 中华平民教育促进会 in Ding Xian (Ding County), Hebei, 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 and other American foundations, Yen and his team of experts aimed to develop affordable techniques and prototypes which could be all across China using mainly resources from within the village. They hoped to show that the causes of poverty, ignorance, sickness, and disorganization could be addressed without class warfare and that violent revolution was not necessary to change village life.

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:

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