In late 1937 Helen and Edgar returned to Shanghai, which they found still burning from Japan’s bombing on the Chinese section of the city. About 80 percent of Shanghai’s factories and workshops had been destroyed by the Japanese. All the treaty ports were in similar condition or under threat of it. Helen became extremely concerned about how the urban Chinese would survive as they became refugees driven into the rural countryside. She told Edgar that something had to be done.
With her ancestor’s pioneer experience in mind, Helen Snow initiated the idea of industrial cooperatives, which would help the displaced workers to join peasant tradesman in small enterprises that they owned and managed themselves. Together with Edgar and Rewi Alley, Helen convinced both the Nationalists and Communists to accept the co-ops for the benefit of all Chinese.
Both Edgar Snow and Rewi Alley described Helen as the first to push the idea of combining wartime work-relief with cooperative organization. Snow wrote: “Industrial cooperation –¬ in hundreds of busy self-supporting workshops throughout China, was… the brain child of Nym Wales… But for her faith and enthusiasm, the movement might never have come into being”.
Following the official inauguration of the Chinese industrial cooperative association in 1938, thousands of co-ops were organized throughout the country. All sorts of daily necessities were produced in large quantity by the co-ops, giving necessary support to the army and people in the warfront against Japanese invaders. While the Snows did not personally organize co-ops in the field, as Alley did, they campaigned tirelessly soliciting support for them in the United States, the Philippines and elsewhere. This was done in close association with the International Committee of Indusco, whose chairwoman was Madame Sun Yat-sen. Along with Ida Pruitt, Helen helped set up and run the American Committee in Aid of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives in New York, becoming its vice-chairperson. Mrs. Anna Roosevelt, the U.S. President’s mother, was honorary head. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's wife, was a sponsor. The committee collected some $5 million U.S. dollars in wartime relief funds for Indusco.
Using her pen name Nym Wales, Helen Snow wrote much about the industrial cooperatives. Her China Builds for Democracy, (New York, 1940), a unique book about the story of Chinese industrial cooperatives, was re-published a few years later in India, with a preface by Prime Minister Nehru, as a textbook for the cooperative movement in his country. During her visit to India in 1972 the Indian government gave Helen Snow a VIP reception, and honored her as “Queen of Co-ops”.
The Indusco system of systematically incubating cooperatives was the first major attempt to foster self-generating economic development among uneducated peasants on a massive scale in the 20th Century. Helen Snow believed that Indusco could serve as a bridge between different political groups and different social systems. It was also a very good way to build up democracy at the grass-roots level in China.
The motto of the cooperatives, “Gung Ho”, (meaning ‘work together’) was destined to enter the American language. It became the battle-cry of the famed U.S. Marine Raider Battalion of World War II under the command of Evans F. Carlson, who adopted it from the co-operatives which he staunchly supported. Later it came to denote a spirited effort.
Helen’s interest in industrial cooperatives in China was lifelong. In her book, My China Years, published in 1984, she recalled, “My best energy and creative ability went into thinking of ways of getting the industrial cooperatives going… The Gung Ho project had a life of its own. No matter how many times it was given up as impossible and hopeless it rose again” … Naturally she applauded its revival in the 1980s, and gladly joined its re-established International Committee, remaining a member till her death.
Because of her key role in starting the Gung Ho cooperatives, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice in the 1980s.