"Originally," he wrote to his beloved younger sister, "I was a common Chinese, but gradually through ten years of life as a student, I developed a foreign, aristocratic tendency."

Then "suddenly, like the Yellow River breaking its dikes..., I woke up [juewu, the Buddhist term for satori] to the fact that I was being robbed of my Chineseness."

He denounced "false intelligentsia" (wei zhishi jieji) for drawing on second hand, foreign experience of which they had no authentic knowledge.

In December 1921, Cai Yuanpei, Tao, and other educationists founded the National Association for the Advancement of Education (Zhong-Hua jiaoyu gaijin hui) and he was elected as secretary-general.

At the height of its literacy campaign in the 1920s, Yen estimated that the MEM had taught five million students with more than 100,000 volunteer teachers.

He was in the United States when war with Japan broke out in 1937, but returned to China, where he was made a member of the People's Political Council.

Fearing that he would meet the same fate as other intellectuals assassinated by right wing Nationalists, he worked frantically, leading to exhaustion and death.