VISITOR FROM CHINA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 454, 5 March 1948, Page 8

VISITOR FROM CHINA

News of Rewi Alley and His Co-operatives

it is much more distinguished to arrive in these islands by ship. International air travel is a humdrum sort of business — the plane drops in as N question about it, in 1948

casually as a taxi, on to a runway identical with all the thousands of runways from Teheran to Shanghai. Out they come, the crushed business suits and Whitehall hats and attaché cases, to pile again | with their luggage

into a waiting bus and ride-if not forever, at, least quite a long way to their

hotels. However exciting the flight may have been, the end of it is as flat as Whenuapai. But the arrival of a passenger ship from overseas is different, now that it has become almost as rare an event as it was a hundred years ago. And the atmosphere somehow holds up-not just those immemorial associations of the sea that still have power to move the most phlegmatic Briton, but others more local and native. The tall red-and-black funnels or the squat buff ones that once more spell New Zealand in the ports of the world (will there ever come a time when a Tudor IV is as immediately distinguishable to all eyes from a Constellation as a Union Company ship is froma Matson liner?). Then the wharves and the gangways, a band from somewhere; and Customs waiting in a long dark shed on the quay. A Question of Hats This is all shameless digression for a serious interviewer; but the visitor from China I had set out to meet was finally arriving in Wellington-after a swift

dash from Japan to Australia in an RAAF. plane — by the Wahine. "Townsend?" the deck-steward ruminated, when I had made my way aboard to an empty cabin. "Tall dark chap? He’s just gone ashore." Under the letter T at the barrier I found a lounging

unhurried figure in flannels and a brown soft Harris tweed jacket: the cut of the clothes and some inflexions of the soft voice recalled America, the eyes were light jade-green and seemed to be enjoying a private joke.

"You’ve got it with you?" the Customs man was saying. "Then let’s have a look at it." I expected Chinese tribute silks or a bit of silver filigree; but what came out of the pocket was a flimsily wrapped, somewhat crushed but still defiant cocktail hat. "Hum," said the Customs man professionally and began to scribble in his notebook; firmly repressing my curiosity, I introduced myself. Though China ‘is a large country, the number of Europeans wandering about in it is limited: and the number of those who work with the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives is more limited _ still. Peter Townsend’s name had been familiar to me for a long time, and we knew a lot of the same people. We had barely exchanged a few of the inevitable greetings of China hands in exile when we were joined by C. S. Falconer, viceChairman of CORSO, who advanced down the quay wearing a highly respectable city bowler and a red-and-white CORSO armband. All identifications thus secured (and the black lace trifle, undesecrated by chalk marks, returned to its pocket) we moved off into Wellington sunshine. Oxford to Paochi By the time this interview appears in print, Mr. Townsend will have been heard in a Sunday evening talk over all National stations, and perhaps on a number of public platforms as well. He has a story to tell that New Zealanders should be eager to hear, for it is a story of rural industrial organisation and achievement and setback and reorganisation which-though the setting is China -will always remain associated as a matter of history, with the name of a pioneering New Zealander, Rewi Alley. Mr. Townsend himself (and he ig not alone in this opinion) considers Rewi Alley one of the best ambassadors this country ever sent abroad. But while paying tribute to all that Alley has accomplished in China, he is still more insistent about the present urgent need of the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives for outside help. Peter Townsend is a young Englishman who first found his way into the heart of war-torn China in the cause

A "LISTENER" interview by JAMES BERTRAM with PETER TOWNSEND, Executive Secretary of the International Committee for Chinese Industrial Co-operatives, who is visiting New Zealand on behalf of a movement with which he has been actively associated for six years.

of international relief. In the year of Munich-the last year of peace in our time-he was reading history at Worcester College, Oxford; as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit he worked in hospitals in England during the first war months, and late in 1941 he went out with an ambulance unit to China. Japanese bombs met him at Singapore, and again at Rangoon, before his convoy moved in over the old Burma road; and he had not been long in China before he received a request from Rewi Alley to take over the work of George Hogg at Paochi, the bustling little Shensi town that was in 1942 headquarters of the Indusco movement in the northwest. Hogg went north to help build up and become first headmaster of the Bailie School for C.I.C. apprentices-a job which he carried on with something like genius until his sudden death from tetanus in 1945. Peter ‘Townsend remained for a year at Paochi as "ocean secretary" (overseas representative) of the co-ops.; later he put in another year ‘on the roads in Szechwan, chiefly working on transport; in 1944 he took up his

present post as executive secretary to the International Committee for C.I.C., under the chairmanship of the crusading Bishop of Hong Kong, the Rt. Rev. R. O. Hall. The outline history of the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives-now, as a movement, nearly t0 years old-is fairly well known in this country; they came into being as an emergency wartime measure to help maintain internal Chinese production, and have continued since the war as a strenuous experiment in co-operative organisation and practical democracy. I had been in at the birth of it all in the China of the late *thirties; but Townsend had himself been part of the movement, working in close co-operation with Rewi Alley, during the hardest war years. "Do you still think," I asked him, "that co-opera-tion really suits China and the Chinese?" "Yes, I’m sure it does. As a form of industrial organisation it is very Close indeed to the traditional patterns of Chinese society-and it’s not destructive of those old social forms, like Western style factory industry." "In spite of Chinese individualism and the family system?" This. drew a very Chinese. smile. "People who talk about the family system. in China don’t always remember

how wide a range the family implies. Admittedly, this has been the only guarantee of security for most Chinese throughout their history, and they still rely on it. But a Chinese family isn’t any biological unit of one generation; it pretty soon spreads out into a small clan or tribe. One of our ideas in training Incusco co-operators is to try to enlarge this consciousness of interdependence to cover a wider community group, and it seems to work all right." Growth of a Movement "How much would you say the Industrial Co-operative movement owes to the work of Rewi Alley? Would it ever have got going without him?" "The conditions were ripe, of course, when the movement was launched; but unquestionably Alley gave it invaluable creative drive in the first stages." "And when you first struck it in 1942 the movement was at its height?" I was thinking of the phenomenal growth of industrial co-ops. throughout Free China in 1940-41. "Perhaps just a little past the peak. But it was still very strong indeed,

especially in the north-west. I remember the sort of meetings we had in Paochi; the co-ops. had their own drama groups, there was always mass-singing and so forth. It was a real popular mass movement in those days, with an atmosphere of tremendous enthusiasm." "But since then it’s lost ground?" "It’s true the numbers have dropped, from the wartime peak of nearly 2000 co-ops., with perhaps 100,000 workers, in Nationalist China ‘alone. But this can be misleading, too-many of the co-ops. that have since failed came into existence to meet a purely wartime need, and had no post-war future anyway. Those that are left are a hardy nucleus, thoroughly tested and much stronger in original ability than ever before. So the pruning down process may not be altogether a bad thing." "What is the present strength of the movement?" ' He thought this over. "At a very conservative estimate, taking only those we know about spread over all China, we have about 1500 co-ops. with some 50,000 to 60,000 members." "All over China-does that mean on both sides of the civil war?" "Fortunately, yes. The CIC. has been able to maintain its integrity as a (continued on next page)

VISITOR FROM CHINA (continued from previous page) non-partisan organisation, and it operates freely in Communist as well as in Nationalist territory. \A lot of our first organisers, you may remember, were sent up to North China, with full permission from the Central Government, ‘in 1938; they have remained there and carried on in what has since become ‘Communist’ territory. It’s very hard to get reports and figures, of course; but if I gave you a reasonable guess (instead of that ultra-conservative estimate) for all Indusco members including North China, it might be something like half-a-million." I asked Mr. Townsend if he had himself seen anything of the co-ops. in Com-munist-held territory. "Yes, in 1946 I went up to Yenan to inspect the co-opératives in that district. It was really impressive-there had been amazingly rapid growth. One textile co-op. near Yenan, for instance, had 200 members operating 80 looms; there was another very big paper-making co-op.

using water-power, originally capitalised with funds from Java. And you felt that Indusco here had really raised the whole standard of living of North Shensi." Some reasons for this, Mr. Townsend suggested, might be found in the fact that the Chinese Communists were especially concerned with rural problems-they were particularly active always among the peasants, whereas the Kuomintang, in Nationalist China, included many industrialists and had within its territory most of the established centres of Western-style factory production. Rewi Alley’s Position "And how does Alley himself stand to-day, in all this?" This was one of the questions I had most wanted to ask, for I knew there had been difficulties during the war years, and stories had come back to New Zealand of personal and political complications adversely affecting the work of the real founder of Indusco. Peter Townsend, on the whole, was reassuring. "Since George Hogg’s death, Rewi Alley has been carrying on at the Bailie School in Shantan, Kansu, concentrating on the job of training boys from the co-ops., and from farming |families, to continue the work of

organisation. Technically, he’s still an advisor to the Chinese Government; there was some trouble for a _ time, when certain groups in the Government got the idea that the C.I.C. was a disguised political movement. But I do think that that misunderstanding has -now passed, and the Central Government is satisfied that Indusco is in fact just what it set out to be-a method of democratic rural industrial organisation." "But Alley is no longer a paid official of the Government?" "His salary-it’s quite a good one on paper, 6000 U.S. dollars-is paid by the Indusco Committee in America. Of course, he uses only bare living expenses for himself and the Chinese boys he’s adopted: the rest goes into running expenses for the Shantan school, which is always right up against it trying to meet its budget. Alley is paid as Field Secretary for the International Committee, which has its office in Shanghai." "Have you seen him recently? Some of us here think he badly needs a holiday, and would like to get him out to New Zealand."

"I saw him last October in Shanghai, when he was down for a flying visit. It’s true he hasn’t been very fit-though we're all much happier about him now that there’s a good New Zealand doctor in Shantan. When some more of your CORSO personnel get settled in Shantan, it might be possible for Rewi to get away for a month or so; but I’m sure it wouldn’t be for long." A New CORSO Committee, I asked Mr. Townsend if he had met any of the CORSO volunteers in China, especially those assigned to work with Alley in the C.I.C. He was warm in his praise of the success of Dr, and Mrs. R. R. Spencer in establishing a clinic at Shantan, where they had come triumphantly through their first hard winter, 6000 feet up among the mountains, The Spencers had been first on the scene; but they had now been followed at Shantan by an industrial science teacher, John Bennett, of Palmerston North; and a machinist, George Masson, of Auckland. Shirley Barton, also of Auckland, is now acting as secretaryorganiser with the International Committee in Shanghai. "These New Zealanders sent over through CORSO are all grand peopleand they’ve settled down to hard work (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) right away. We are tremendously grateful for such practical help. But we still

need all kinds of technical equipment-. and we very badly need funds." Then it was my turn to tell Mr. Townsend of the CORSO Committee —

for © Chinese Industrial Co-opera-tives, recently formed in Wellington under the chairmanship of Sir Thomas Hunter. "We are making a national appeal for £10,000 to be called the Rewi Alley Appeal Fund, to provide running expenses for the Shantan school for one year at least. CORSO made an initial grant of £500 to launch the fund; and a separate committee in Christchurch has been hard at work raising money too." Mr. Townsend, whose brief three weeks in New Zealand will be spent in a further endeavour to enlist support for the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives before he returns to China, fully encorsed this scheme. "You are certainly right in making your immediate appeal for funds. If New Zealand, which gave Rewi Alley to China, can find the money to carry the Bailie School for a year in this very difficult period, you will be doing something that may mean a very great deal to China in the years ahead. And you will be helping a movement that has done more than any official mission could ever do to make the name of New Zealand known as a friend to many hundreds of thousands of simple, hard-working villagers in a great country that is, after all,-one of your nearest Pacific neighbours."