U. S. Policy in Asia

In a remote Philippine village, many miles from Manila, I saw recently a crude hand-lettered poster hanging in a palmthatched shed. It read:

Go to the People.
Live among them.
Learn from them.
Love them.
Serve them.
Plan with them.
Start with what they know.
Build on what they have.

Reading it, my thoughts went back twenty years--to another such primitive village, in China, where "Jimmy" Yen had set up a "social and human laboratory" to teach the long-ignored peasants how to fight poverty, ignorance and disease. For, as the poster proclaimed, this Filipino village, too, was now under the spell of Jimmy's zeal and genius.

What Jimmy Yen had learned in thirty years of social crusading in his native land is today being successfully applied in the Philippines. With the enthusiastic backing of President Ramón Magsaysay, that country has become the pilot plant for an idea which, if it fulfills its present promise, may hold the best hope for keeping free Asia free. For basically the problems of the masses throughout the East are the same. They long desperately for two things: a full rice bowl and human dignity. And no one is more searchingly aware than Jimmy Yen that these are the best antidotes to communism.

Long before there was Point Four, there was Yen. Dr. Y. C. Yen, a lean, wise, dedicated scholar who looks far younger than his sixty years, is world-famous for the Mass Education Movement he launched in China shortly after World War I. In the years before the Chinese Red Government made it impossible for

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