REWI ALLEY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 July 1942, Page 4

REWI ALLEY

NEW ZEALANDER’S FINE ACHIEVEMENT MIRACLES IN INDUSTRIAL REORGANISATION. GREAT WORK IN CHINA. New Zealand, unknowing, has had an expeditionary force in China —an expeditionary force consisting of one man, Rewi Alley, writes Mr J. Robertson, M.P., in a recent issue of “The Standard.” The story of Rewi Alley, he states, is the story of Indusco, the Chinese Industrial Co-operative organisation, the living chain of wartime industries that came into being under his hand and brain for the defence of China and the rehabilitation of her people. In the course of his article, Mr Robertson stated that Chinese industry had been concentrated in the great towns near the coast: Peiping, Tientsin, Shanghai, Nanking, and Canton. The beginning of the war saw 90 per cent of that industry destroyed or immobilised. A large population torn up by the roots and transplanted in a new environment had to be clothed and fed and organised and usefully employed. It was in July, 1938, that the AngloIrish New Zealander, Rewi Alley, began the work that has made him an international figure. The objectives of Indusco were “to combine speedy reconstruction with productive refugee relief, the training and militant mobilisation of labour, an economic basis for political democracy, and a means of defending the guerilla districts against both blockade and economic conquest by Japanese goods." Alley planned to establish, in places inaccessible to Japanese motor-mech-anised troops, thousands of small semimobile units as bases for China's resistance. These would operate in three great areas of economic defence or lines of industry: — (1) Front line units, readily mobile, even portable, using water power or hand power and beginning with light machines or tools salvaged from the scorched cities. (2) More substantial industries, semimobile. between the main front and the rear, and a system of co-operative transport camels, carts, mules, horses, and human carriers. (3) Rear-area Industrial co-opera-tives in provinces safe from early invasion, where mines could be worked and machines and tools produced for all three zones. Here, under the central headquarters, would be the marketing and distribution services, training schools, co-operative hospitals, war veterans’ and war orphans’ vocational centres, clinics, creches, and other social products of which Alley dreamed. Indusco factories make medical supplies, uniforms, hand grenades, electrical equipment, wagons, tents, stretchers, and other’ military necessities. Forty thousand Indusco spinners _ and weavers now equip the entire Chinese army with blankets—some of which were formerly imported from Japan. Many kinds of industry are represented in the hundreds of miniature factories. The groups supply both army needs and native products to fill China s empty markets. . Alley served with the N.Z.E.F. in the first World War, was gassed twice, severely wounded, and decorated for gallantry in action. Taking up sheepfarming, he saw the bottom drop out of the wool market. Then, as factory inspector to the Shanghai Municipal Council, later chief , of the industrial department, he carried on a ten-yeai struggle to inject a little decency into Asiatic industry. “In my opinion,” Mr Robertson states “Rewi Alley bids fair to be perhaps already is—the greatest living New Zealander outside of New Zealand.”