Helen Foster Snow was a witness to the birth of new China and historian of the modern Chinese revolution. She recorded first hand the history of the Chinese student movement, workers movement, left-wing literary and art movement and the Chinese Communist movement. She served as a source person of modern Chinese history for China scholars in the United States over half a century.
Confronting the Japanese aggression against China in 1935, Helen made a clear-cut statement to public: the Snows are not neutral！ Helen was drawn into not only reporting on the student movement but aiding it. Helen provided a spark to the movement, offering her home as a meeting place, giving suggestions, using her journalistic connection to publicize the students’ ideas, and even teaching them how to create propaganda for their movement. Helen’s status as a sacrosanct foreigner gave her freedoms, which the students did not have. She was able to report on their activities without repercussions, including articles in the influential China Weekly Review. The slanted nature of her writing might have destroyed her chances of becoming a famous journalist, but she valued her status as an activist more, and chose to become part of history rather than a passive observer of it
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.
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. Edgar 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 Hankou, 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 City, 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 the Chinese industrial cooperatives, was re-published a few years later in India, with a preface by Prime Minister Nehru. It served 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 “Mother of the 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.