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People in the United States might recognize the Chinese phrase Gung Ho as an unofficial motto of the US Marine Corps. But few people in China are familiar with it.
Meaning “work together,” the term can be traced to a movement started in China by foreign friends and Chinese activists to support China’s resistance against Japanese invaders in the 1930s.
The Gung Ho movement later formed the foundation of the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (ICCIC), which this year celebrated its 70th anniversary with one of its founders in attendance.
Isabel Crook, now 94, was a driving force of the movement and later became a consultant of ICCIC and a passionate promoter of a cooperative economy in China. Her son Michael, 58, is now vice-chairman of the organization, advocating a bigger cooperative sector in China.
The Gung Ho movement was initiated in Shanghai by New Zealander Rewi Alley and American writer Edgar Snow in 1937. It organized refugees and unemployed workers for production to support China’s war against Japanese invaders. To win support and raise funds from abroad, Madam Soong Ching Ling established the ICCIC in Hong Kong in 1939.
Cooperatives were organized throughout unoccupied China with about 30,000 people in 3,000 cooperatives at the movement’s peak in 1941.
While China has embraced the market economy for more than 30 years, the Crooks and others believe that the cooperative economy has a bright future in China.
“There is no exploitation in cooperatives,” said Michael Crook. “The labor-capital dichotomy doesn’t exist. There are no industrial-relations problems. The owner is the producer.”
Crook admitted that the cooperative sector in China is still “pathetically small”, accounting for less than 1 percent of China’s total economy. But his enthusiasm for cooperatives remains undiminished.
In the late 1980s he helped revive the ICCIC, which had been suspended since 1952, when cooperatives were replaced by collectives and a communal economy after the founding of New China. After 35 years of suspension, ICCIC resumed activities in 1987 at the request of a group of “Old Gung Ho” members who had campaigned for the revival of cooperatives.
Crook first worked as a volunteer of the organization, resumed with capital of about 3 million yuan. The group’s task: to develop and promote real cooperatives suited to the nascent market economy in China.
“Although the I stands for industrial, we are now a promotional organization for all forms of cooperatives,” Crook said.
Now ICCIC is working more in rural areas than urban areas. It provides training and expertise to local cooperatives.
Since its revival in 1987, ICCIC has helped set up and fund more than 20 pilot industrial cooperatives in Hubei, Gansu and Shandong provinces. It has also worked with local federations to fund women’s cooperatives at the grass-roots level. Many cooperatives were established by rural women and laid-off female workers in Baoding, a city in Hebei province. Playing a positive role in improving women’s economic and social status is key.
But the staff of ICCIC soon realized that giving away money wasn’t the best way to promote cooperatives, so they switched from funding to training. “Now we don’t run cooperatives. We support them,” said Crook. “We help them mainly through training.”
The ICCIC was granted an annual budget of 50,000 yuan by the government after it was revived in 1987. It received its “last penny” from the government in the early 1990s, said Crook. Since then, offshore funding has provided its support.
The term Gung Ho became popular in the US when Evans Carlson, a US Marine Corps major, stirred the men of his 2nd Marine Raiders Battalion by tapping its spirit of cooperation. The phrase spread to American society when it became the title of a 1943 war film, Gung Ho!, about the battalion’s raid on Makin Island in 1942.
Crook said the ICCIC is now using its popularity in the Western world to raise fund through international non-governmental organizations and other agencies. The Gung Ho movement is strengthening ties to other international cooperative associations and federations, from which it can exchange expertise. It is also seeking financial resources and individual expertise as it grows.
The funding of ICCIC has grown from 200,000 yuan to about 2 million yuan. “We have got up 10-fold, but we are still tiny,” Crook said. “Some of our idealists would like to see a large and booming cooperative sector in China.”
Today the Gung Ho movement is reconnecting with many of its international friends, but still needs to attract young activists and win the support of local governments.
But Crook said the most important thing for cooperatives to grow in China was legal protection at national level. On that front, the ICCIC is now busy lobbying for a strong national law on cooperatives and urging easier credit terms for small producer cooperatives.
“There is no legal protection for cooperatives at the national level,” he said. “And there is an awful a lot of work for us to do.”
