Jen Hung-chün (20 December 1886-9 November 1961), known as H. C. Zen, educational administrator and a pioneer in the effort to promote modern scientific learning in China. He held such positions as president of the Science Society of China (1914-23, 1934-36, 1947-50), executive director of the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture (1929-34, 1942^8), head of National Szechwan University (1935-37), and secretary general of the Academia Sinica 1939-42). After 1949 he served the Central People's Government as a member of the Government Council's Commission on Culture and Education. He was married to Ch'en Heng-che (q.v.).

Although his native place was Wuhsing, Chekiang, H. C. Zen was born into a gentry family in Pahsien, Szechwan. He attended the first modern public school established in Pahsien, where he received training in classical studies as well as the rudiments of Western education. In 1904 he entered the newly established Prefectural Middle School of Chungking, where he began to study world history and geography. He also read the translations of Yen Fu (q.v.), gleaning from them vivid, if fragmentary, conceptions of Western thought. His English teacher, Y'ang Ch'ang-pai, introduced him to contemporary Chinese revolutionary propaganda. Like many other schoolboys of his generation, Zen became an avid reader of the officially banned Hsin-min ts'ung-pao, published in Tokyo by Liang Ch*i-ch'ao (q-v.), and others, which advocated the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. While pursuing these diverse trends of thought, Zen did not neglect his preparations for the district examination in Pahsien, which he passed in 1904.

In 1906, after being graduated from middle school, H. C. Zen taught school in Chungking. Early in 1908, he left China for Japan to further his education at the Higher Technical College of Tokyo. He soon joined the T'ung-meng-hui and became the chairman of its Szechwan branch. In Japan, he often met with other members of the T'ung-meng-hui at the home of Miyazaki Torazo, a close associate of Sun Yat-sen.

When the revolution broke out in 1911, H. C. Zen returned to China to serve as secretary in the presidential office of the provisional government at Nanking. It was perhaps then that he met Sun Yat-sen, whom he admired greatly. Sun's manifesto to the nation, which was issued after his assumption of the presidency, was drafted by Zen. After the dissolution of the provisional government in 1912, Zen served in the cabinet of T'ang Shao-yi (q.v.) as recording secretary until T'ang resigned in June 1912 because of a disagreement with Yuan Shih-k'ai. Zen edited the anti-Yuan Alin-i Pao in Tientsin and then left China to study in the United States.

H. C. Zen was a student at Cornell University from 1912 to 1916 and a graduate student at Columbia University in 1917, receiving his B.A. and M.A. in chemistry. He participated in Chinese student affairs, wrote for the Chinese Students Quarterly, and engaged in a heated discussion with Hu Shih on the desirability of employing the Chinese vernacular language as a medium of literary expression. During this period, he courted Sophia H. Chen (Ch'en Heng-che, q.v.). They were married in Peking in 1920.

In 1914 Zen and other Chinese students at Cornell organized the Science Society of China. The stated aims of the society were the diffusion of scientific knowledge among the Chinese people, the encouragement of scientific research by the members, and the promotion of industrial progress of the nation. As the first step toward the realization of these goals, the society published 1915 the first issue of its magazine, K'o-hsüeh [science]. For several years the magazine was printed in Shanghai but edited in the United States, first in Ithaca, then in Cambridge. It continued publication until 1950. When its leaders began to return home, the society was removed to China, where its main office was established in Nanking. It came to have branches in Shanghai, Peking, and Canton. H. C. Zen served three terms as president of the Science Society of China (1914-23, 1934-36, 1947-50) and sat on the board of directors almost from its inception. The society published many scientific monographs and translations, supported the Biological Research Institute in Nanking and a science library in Shanghai, and held lectures and exhibits in various cities. Until the organization of the Academia Sinica in 1927, the Science Society was probably the most influential scientific body in China. For this reason, Zen and his associates in the society—such as V. K. Ting (Ting Wen-chiang), Chu K'o-chen, Yang Ch'uan, and Wong W^en-hao (qq.v.) —must be considered pioneers in the development of modern science in China. Zen was also an early member of the Chinese Engineering Society, which was founded in the United States.

In 1919, two years after his return to China from the United States, H. C. Zen was asked by the Szechwan authorities to draw up plans for the creation of iron and steel works in the province. In connection with this project, he made a trip to the United States in 1919-20 to purchase machinery. In 1920 he taught science at Peking University. He served from 1920 to 1922 as chief of the technical education section in the ministry of education, from 1922 to 1923 as editor of the Commercial Press in Shanghai, and from 1923 to 1925 as vice chancellor of National Southeast University in Nanking. Many of the founders of the Science Society taught at Southeast University, and Zen's appointment further strengthened the relationship between the two institutions. On 16 July 1925, the American government announced the remittance to China of the balance of the American Boxer Indemnity Fund. The money was to be used, at the discretion of the President of the United States, for educational and cultural activities in China. A board of trustees consisting of ten Chinese and five American members would decide which organizations were to receive grants. The China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture was organized to receive and administer the funds. H. C. Zen was among the first appointees to the foundation. As executive director from 1929 to 1935, he devoted much of his energy to the realization of the foundation's basic aim, the promotion of scientific research and education in China. In reply to the criticism that the foundation's funds were controlled by a small group of men instead of being administered by the national authorities, Zen stated in 1932 that the foundation had been established to prevent government officials from misappropriating the money for civil war purposes.

H. C. Zen also helped to propagate the scientific achievements of China abroad. He was a member of the Chinese delegation to the Third Pan-Pacific Science Congress, held in 1927 in Tokyo, where he obtained recognition from the Science Society as the official body representing Chinese scientists. In 1931 he wrote a chapter on science for the Symposium on Chinese Culture, edited by his wife. Although Zen had been a member of the T'ung-meng-hui, he never joined its successor, the Kuomintang. He had shared the enthusiasm of many progressive Chinese for the Northern Expedition, which put the Kuomintang into power and which was regarded as a step toward the elimination of warlords and the modernization of the nation, but he was also a trenchant critic of the conduct of the Kuomintang government. He was a co-founder of the Tu-li p^ing-lun [independent critic], an influential journal of liberal opinion that flourished in the 1930s. In an article opposing the advocates of tang-hua chiao-yü ["partyization" of education], which meant strict party control of education and political indoctrination of the students, he declared that such a concept violated the very purpose of education, which is the development of the intellectual curiosity of individuals and would prove dangerous to the party itself because it would deprive party doctrines of the opportunity to compete with other systems of thought in an open forum. Without such competition, the party would lose its intellectual vitality.

In 1935 H. C. Zen accepted an off"er to head National Szechwan University at Chengtu. As a result of years of civil war and misrule by provincial warlords, Szechwan had become one of the more backward provinces in China. The assignment was a challenge to Zen, who met it with characteristic candor and determination. His initial dislike of Chengtu was reinforced when slanderous attacks on his wife appeared in the local newspapers. Everyone should visit Chengtu at least once, he angrily remarked, and stay for at least a year in order to really understand to what great depth a culture can decline. He believed that there were at least two major obstacles in the path of academic progress in Szechwan: the belief that the university was just another government bureau and the psychological resistance to criticism of any sort. In spite of these obstacles, he was able to bring a number of highly qualified scholars to National Szechwan University and to strengthen its colleges of science and agriculture, especially the research facilities. The agricultural faculty contributed to the important improvements made in grain production in southwest China during the war years. After leaving the university in 1937, he assumed office as chairman of the Commission of Editing and Translation, which was an offshoot of the China Foundation. The outbreak of the war compelled the National Government to search for means for widening its basis of political support. In 1937 H. C. Zen was summoned by Chiang Kai-shek to the Lushan conference. The following year, when the National Government established the People's Political Council, a consultative body composed of delegates from various walks of life and from minor political parties, Zen was appointed to the council as an academic representative.

In 1939 Zen became secretary general of the Academia Sinica and director of its research institute of chemistry. He moved to Kunming, where the institute was located, to direct the unspectacular but vital task of keeping alive the spirit of the scientific experiment at a time when scientists had difficulty keeping themselves alive in an economy beset by inflation. In 1942 he resigned from the Academia Sinica to resume office as executive director of the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture. At that time, the foundation was critically short of funds. In 1939 Boxer Indemnity Fund payments had been suspended, and the foundation, deprived of its regular income, had to depend upon bank loans to maintain its activities. In January 1942 an emergency committee was formed in Chungking, with Wong Wen-hao as chairman, Y. T. Tsur (Chou I-ch'un, q.v.) as honorary secretary, and Arthur N. Young and H. C. Zen as assistant treasurers. The executive committee was composed of Sun Fo, Chiang MonUn, and Arthur N. Young. Because of the efforts of these men, the foundation was able to continue its program of granting research professorships and fellowships, subsidizing scientific and educational institutions, and maintaining the Division of Soils of the National Geographical Survey of China. At the end of the war in 1945, the office of the foundation was removed from Shanghai. In 1946-47 Zen was in the United States. After his return, he lived in Shanghai. He remained in the city after it fell to the Communist armies. On 21 September 1949, he participated in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, held in Peking, as a specially invited delegate. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, he devoted much of his time to the activities of the All-China Federation of Natural Science Societies and became a member of its standing committee. The Science Society ceased to exist, and its function as a national organization of scientists was assumed by the federation. From 1950 to 1954 Jen was a member of the Commission on Culture and Education of the Government Administration Council. After 1954, except for his membership in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, he did not serve the government in any active capacity. However, he continued to work for the federation until his death on 9 November 1961. H. C. Zen and Ch'en Heng-che had three children: a daughter, E-tu (Mrs. S. C. Sun); a son, E-an, who went to live in the United States; and another daughter, E-su (Mrs. Shu-ming Cheng), who remained in China. Zen had three brothers and three sisters. His eldest brother, Jen Hung-hsi, served as the magistrate of two counties. Another brother, Jen Hung-tse, was in business. The youngest brother, Jen Hung-nien, of whom Zen was particularly fond, served as editor of a revolutionary newspaper in Chengtu in 1912. He committed suicide in 1913 to protest the assassination of Sung Chiao-jen (q.v.). H. C. Zen was a talented calligrapher and poet, though most of his poems, written in the classical style, have not been published. His hobbies included stamp collecting and photography. A connoisseur of Chinese art, he served from 1932 to 1937 as an adviser to the Palace Museum in Peiping.