(2 of 2)
The advantages of cooperatives were many. They fitted much better than huge plants into the ancient Chinese tradition of household craft industry. The units were mobile, easily disguised, easily housed, and were not, like big factories, obvious targets for Japanese bombers.
They supplied military needs which no other source in China could produce so efficiently—gloves, caps, greatcoats, padded clothes, gauze, tents, field cots. They saved many a soldier on the northern front from freezing last winter by producing 100,000 woolen blankets. Operating near sources of raw materials and usually for local consumption, they eliminated transportation costs. Above all they provided millions of refugees who trekked west on the heels of freedom with the hope of lasting relief in the form of jobs. At initial cost of only $7, the cooperatives can give a man work which permanently supports him.
Cooperatives entirely revitalized whole towns. In Shuangshipu (Shensi Province), Indusco enrolled 1,200 people—one-tenth of the town's total population. The other nine-tenths live almost solely by supplying services to Indusco members and their families.
Zeal. Lion's share of credit for organizing cooperatives goes to Rewi Alley. Descended from an early Scottish-Irish family of New Zealand settlers, he took his first name from a native New Zealand chief. He served in World War I, then went to China and to work for the Shanghai Municipal Council. In 15 years he made himself the best-informed man in the world on Chinese industrial conditions.
Short, forceful, 40, he worked at Indusco with the nervous energy of a dye-stamping machine. He won Chinese workers by being able to tell jokes in many dialects, by adopting two Chinese sons, by repairing broken machinery with string, bamboo, chewing gum. All his work and hard travel (thousands of miles by bicycle) he endured not for personal gain but simply because he believed in China, in cooperative effort, in democracy.
Chinese Industrial Cooperatives teach coolies not only how to manipulate strange machines, but also how to manipulate ideas, how to work for a common cause, how to subordinate personal means to group ends. Each cooperative governs itself, elects its own officers, makes its own rules. If China ever succeeds in becoming truly democratic, it will be because the crankshaft has been turned over by democratic self-starters like Indusco.