Roots of Chinese Democracy

Gung Ho was formed to organize refugees and the unemployed in response to the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in 1937. The Chinese Industrial Cooperative Association was established in 1938, and in its peak year –1941 – boasted nearly 3,000 cooperatives with a membership of nearly 30,000 people who produced more than 500 products for the people in their localities, not to mention blankets, uniforms and other army supplies for the battlefront. Fundraising abroad was handled by the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, founded in Hong Kong in 1939. It attracted money and volunteers from the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore.

But it was also a home-grown movement with a pedigree steeped in China's rural reality; the people themselves carried the torch. Soon after the victorious Communist Party brought in land reform, by the early 50s, voluntary associations of farming households were forming "mutual aid teams." Typically, out of a set of eight plots only one might border on a water source, and not every farmer would have a complete set of tools or equipment; in that case, a cooperative pools resources and labor for building an irrigation system. Proto-cooperatives formed by some of these mutual aid groups then banded together to solve bigger problems and meet wider-ranging goals.

"These were democratically run organizations for the most part," Michael Crook, current Foreign Chair of ICCIC, points out, "often with elected leadership." Circumstances for today's small farms are similar to the 1950s. In a business, as on a state farm, the owner is separate from the worker. In a cooperative, the owners are the workers. Their capital and labor makes them all investors too, and entitles them to share the profits; it's just that those profits are matched to the investment each has put in.

Gung Ho went dormant in 1952. By the late 1950s local cooperatives were already influencing local politics but another structure of jurisdictions was being unfolded top-down by the national government; communes were divisions that today we'd call townships. The two different social processes underway at the time met in the middle. Communes absorbed cooperatives and membership became geographically based and no longer voluntary. Zhang Xiaoshan PhD, Director General at the Institute of Rural Development, clarified, "One change was from voluntary to compulsory participation, and the other was a change in ownership culture. In a private cooperative people contribute their own labor, material and land to the cooperative, whereas in the model that replaced it, a state-created entity owned the land."

Old Model Finds New Legs

Is the cooperative movement – a child of the early 20th century – still relevant in the 21st? Loosen the purse strings for micro loans to farmers, the government of China advised banks at the dawn of 2010, and the modern carriers of the flame at Gung Ho were still standing by, their mandate perhaps more relevant than ever. Farmers need to be confident they can make the most of combining this influx of abstract capital with their natural heritage of assets.