Advancing Communist armies have forced the Chinese director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute to flee with his staff room Yenching University in Peking, an official of the Cambridge branch revealed yesterday.

The director, Kenneth Chen, has reached Hong Kong, the official disclosed, and may set up headquarters at Sun Yat-Sen University there.

Most of the students at Yenching have also left the city. None are known to have taken part in the Communist movement, but it is believed that a sizeable minority may have been Communist sympathizers.

Other Branches Open

According to the latest reports at the Boylston office, the subsidiary branches of the Institute at other Chinese universities are still in operation. The Institute has still to decide whether or not it will continue its activities if the Reds crush the constitutional government. Yale has already announced it will continue its educational activities in China despite the Communist revolution.

The purpose of the Institute is to help finance teaching, research, publication, libraries, and museums in Chinese universities and to grant scholarships at Harvard to worthy Chinese students. Besides the main branch at Peking, the Institute maintains other offices throughout China.