— The Hitherto Untold Role of Helen Snow
in the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Movement
By An-Wei
One day just before the Spring Break, I heard one of the students saying ‘Gung Ho’ in their conversation on the tennis court in Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, where I stayed as a visiting Scholar-in-Residence during the academic year of 1985-1986.
On hearing the Chinese term “Gung Ho” spoken, I was electrified. I went up to her, asking if she often used this word, and her answer was affirmative.
“But, do you know the origin or the story of this word?” I asked again.
“No,” she answered. Later I asked my students and colleagues the same question and I got the same answer.
Ever since then, I often began my lecture by telling this story when I was asked to talk about my study on the life and work of Helen Foster Snow, which always intrigued my listeners greatly. As a matter of fact, fascinated by the Gung Ho story are not only small potatoes today, but also big shots in history.
A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, Eleanor Roosevelt published in her famous column MY DAY on February 26 1942: “Bach at the White House, I had a most interesting talk with Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Snow, who have been back from China about a year. Mrs. Snow is deeply interested in the Chinese cooperative movement, which receives help from all those interested in industry in China. They are making their own machines and gradually working away from the entirely hand-made product. It seems to be the best foundation on which to build for a better standard of living for the people.”
In the early 1940’s, J. Nehru used China Builds For Democracy by Nym Wales, pen-name of Helen Snow, as the textbook to start some 50,000 industrial co-ops in India, which by the 1980’s had the largest number co-op members in the world, with the Soviet Union second and the United States third. Speaking of the great significance of the industrial co-ops, Nehru wrote in 1942: “The democratic basis of these cooperatives and their development on this basis in this warring world are full of interest and significance. On this basis political democracy may survive, it is doubtful if it can do so on any other basis.” Nehru continued: “Possibly the future will lead us and others to a cooperative commonwealth. Possibly the whole world, if it is to rise above its present brutal level of periodic wars, will have to organize itself in some such way.”①
As everybody knows, the Chinese Indusco came into being when the Chinese nation was in peril, and played a significant role in the Anti-Japanese War and earned lasting merit in China’s national survival and her developing revolution. Seeing the vigorous development of industrial cooperatives in China and other countries, we are certainly remembering those few Gung Ho originals who made this movement a reality 50 years ago.
But how was Gung Ho first started? And where did the Gung Ho idea come from? In a recent-found article written in 1940 as “Forward” for the Hong Kong edition of China Builds for Democracy, Edgar Snow wrote:
“Industrial cooperation as realized today in hundreds of busy self-supporting workshops throughout China, was first of all the brain child of Nym Wales. It was she who first interested Rewi Alley in the possibilities of industrial cooperatives… This fact is generously acknowledged by Mr. Alley in his recent pamphlet Two Years of Indusco.
Edgar snow continued: “Chiefly owing to Nym Wales Prodding, Alley and his Bailie engineers worked out the technical details of this scheme which has become such an important pattern of economic and social change in China. But for the soundness of her original concept, and the genius of her faith and enthusiasm, the movement might never have come into being at all.”