A few days after, Helen accompanied Ed Snow to a dinner party given by John and Stella Alexander at their home in Shanghai. John was a British diplomat and his wife an American of a Shanghai family.
During the conversation, John revealed to be a strong supporter of cooperatives and the idea of a cooperative commonwealth. They “talked of solutions to the economic causes of war;” and John Alexander “advanced the idea that the world should be organized on a cooperative basis as a means of making democracy work and of avoiding wars.”② Helen Snow argued against the cooperative solution. Finally John annihilated her by saying flatly:
“Cooperatives are a democratic basis in any kind of society- capitalist, socialist, communist or what have you. There is no argument against them, for anything can be built on such a base.”③
During the discussion, they did not mention cooperatives in relation to industry or China. But this was a new idea to Helen.
As soon as the Snows got back to the Medhurst Apartments, Helen’s mind began to function and she could not sleep. If a British consul was held on cooperatives in Europe, they had to have something going in China which the Empire would not oppose and which the U.S.A. also would not oppose. Helen said: “David Yu had taught me well about the various cliques in the Chinese rotten, sick government, we need to get the European-American cliques, led by the Soong dynasty, to be willing to allow something progressive- This also would bring over the missionaries.”
Alexander had sparked Helen’s thinking about cooperatives.
Helen woke up next morning dreaming about cooperatives. Still half-awake, the solution to China’s chief problem came to her in the flash.
Why not organize the Chinese workers into cooperatives owned and managed by themselves? Here was the way to bring about the industrial revolution, to put unemployed refugees to work in the interior to help win the war and to build up permanent prosperity in the villages. Here was the democratic base for whatever kind of society the Chinese may decide to have in the future and a middle-way bridge where the Kuomintang and the communists might meet half-way and stop the civil war.
To Helen it seems logical for a few Shanghai workers to make their way to the interior to start up their own workshop with their own hands and to flourish by providing goods badly needed for the war scarcity economy. She was brought up on the idea that all a person needed to build a continent was an axe and a Bible. The English colonizers had arrived in the wildness with nothing more and their descendants had thought nothing of moving out on the frontier to build their settlements in a few years. They did not even have labor power to draw upon- nothing but their own hands.