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                            In 1920, Yan returned to China and stopped at Shanghai. In 1922, In 1922, he organized  to set up schools for popular education in Changsha,  capital of Hunan Province. He reduced the Chinese  vocabulary of forty thousand characters to the 1,300 most common characters and  published four readers, which cost twelve cents total. With this handbook, Yan  started the four month-span education with the purpose of getting rid of  illiteracy. There were more than 50,000 beneficiary students. Mao Zedong was  one of the 100 voluntary teachers at that time. | 
                           
                        
                            In Jun of 1938, Mao Zedong said that Yan, as a religionist,  successfully promoted national-scale popular education. He hoped more excellent  leaders to participate in Yan’s project. 
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