Chinese Spinsters

Manawatu Times, Volume 66, Issue 264, 6 November 1941, Page 3

Chinese Spinsters

WILL TIGHT JAPANESE WITH BRITISH LOOMS

Chinese women who have been supplying their fighting men with blankets laboriously made on spinning wheels of mediaeval pattern are to have up-to-date machinery from Britain. The new looms will be based on a design not used since the eighteenth century, and on a smaller scale than used then to allow them to be worked by peasant labour and moved about the countryside when a Japanese advance is imminent. 'Sent out by the Anglo-Chinese Development Society, London, the machinery will be used by the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives, an organisation which is one of China ’s. strongest defences agoinst Japanese aggresion. The co-operatives, small units of labour with membership ranging from 7 to 1000, have been recruited from the 160,000,000 refugees who, starving and i homeless, fled from the advancing Japanese armies along /the roads into the interior. With the support of the Central Government it is hoped to set l up 30,000 co-operatives, working a mobile chain of light industries from Inner Mongolia to the eastern sea. At first they will serve the needs of their 'own districts; later, with the help of marketing co-operatives, they will sup~ply larger areas. 1 Each co-operative member receives wages on a scale similar to, or higher than, that prevailing in the local industries, and after all expenses have been met the surplus is shared out. By the end of last year there were 2000 co-operatives working in 18 provinces of Free China and the “guerilla areas.’ ’ Many of them have repaid the Government loans with which thoy were founded and the rest pay the interest on them regularly. They are manufacturing 114 different kinds of goods, including cotton cloth, blankets, paper, soap, shoes, alcohol, medical cotton and gauze.