Co-Operatives In China INDUSTRIAL ARMY

Grey River Argus, 21 September 1939, Page 10

Co-Operatives In China INDUSTRIAL ARMY

MEN WITHOUT MACHINES. (By Edgar Snow in “The Left News.") Little machinery was salvaged by China before the loss of Shanghai. When Hankow and Tsingtao fell, we knew, over 90 per cent, of the nation s pre-war industry would be immobilised. Perhaps nowhere else was a nation’s industry so narrowly concentrated. Once it was cut off from the hinterland, by Japanese occupation of the cities,’ China had lost its main industrial base, and the army and the people were obliged to fall back on an almost totally agrarian countryside. Who would supply the thousands of villages with commodity goods for which they had depended on Shanghai industry ? How was China to carry on a “protracted war” without industry ? True, the Government had announced plans to rebuild largescale industry in the far west. But in that backward region of China, utterly lacking in primary industry, such replacement could do little more, at best, than meet the most urgent needs of the Army. It could not satisfy the demands of the commodity market on a national scale.

Moreover, nearly a million men and women had been thrown out of jobs

by the destruction and closure of prewar industry. Among them were tens of thousands of skilled workers, the most advanced section of proletariat, many of them destitute, unorganised, and without leadership or political instruction. Every day saw new recruits added to the army of refugees. In the occupied cities thousands were being herded into concentration camps and soup kitchens, fed by charity. Thousands of others who retreated with the Chinese armies, abandoning their burning homes and shops, became burdens on a society which provided no work for them.

What of their future ? The frontier of their hope was a job, a livelihood, and security. Without that, how could they think of an abstract principle like patriotism ? But a job, in the occupied areas, where Japan had taken over control of every phase of urban life, could mean but one thing; helping the invader. Every worker in Japanese-controlled industry in China had to be regarded as just as much a puppet soldier as the unhappy destitutes whom Japan recruited actively to police her conquests. Here was the fundamental fact. If China did not mobilise her proletariat, quite clearly Japan would—and mobilise it against China. CHINA MOBILISES HER RESOURCES. What was the answer ? None but the Government could mobilise the people. But something at least might be done to mobilise China’s productive power, with Government help. It was that conviction that led a number of Chinese and others to form a little Committee for discussion, early in 1938, to advocate a plan the necessity for which was manifest.

They called themselves the Shanghai Promotion Committee for Chinese Industrial Co-operatives. Their first chairman Hsu Hsing-loh, was that rare creature, a banker gifted with social vision, and one of the great

men of his country. Their technical section was headed by Rewi Alley, and other members included two of China’s best engineers, Lem Fu-yi and Wu Chu-fei, and a Co-operative expert, Liu Kuang-mien. Hsu Hsingloh was killed in an airplane shot down by the Japanese near Canton. But to-day Rewi Alley, Lem Fu-yi, and Liu Kuang-mien, all hold strategic posts on the new defence line being rapidly built up by Chinese Industrial' Co-operatives. (To be Continued).