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This discussion examines wartime debates over the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives' (CIC) 'Gung Ho' movement. The CIC experience provides a distinctive case study of mobilisation in Nationalist China at war, endeavouring to extend the momentum of the 'great industrial migration' as a force for social transformation, from the inland cities to the countryside. CIC was also to become a focus for overseas support for Chinas resistance against Japanese invasion. The discussion reveals differences over elite- and mass-based strategies for cooperative development as revealed from Western inputs into the CIC debates, at the same time noting different ways in which foreigners sought to strengthen relations with wartime China. While CIC's promoters reached beyond philanthropism towards a pragmatic solidarity, cooperative experts from the emerging international development community sought universal formulations for overseas assistance, advocating adherence to Western cooperative models, and reinforcing an elitist emphasis on expertise. CIC was to fall far short of its ambitions for a people's cooperative movement as a permanent force for Chinas democratic future. Here it is argued that under combined pressures of Guomindang (Nationalist Party, Kuomintang) statism and Western neocolonialism, CIC's distinctive developmental strategy, based on the mobilisation of workers in cooperative self-help, was never allowed to fulfil its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shanghai Refugee Children Nutritional Aid Committee, formed in 1937, sought to improve refugee children's nutritional health by making and distributing a scientifically tested soybean milk and soybean cakes. By 1942, the Committee had adopted a national platform and changed its moniker to the Chinese Nutritional Aid Council, with plans to open offices and nutrition clinics in Chongqing, Chengdu, Guiyang and Kunming. This paper argues that in linking biomedical understandings of nutrition with social change, this group of Western-trained physicians and young female social workers enacted a new kind of social activism, one which seized upon the food-as-fuel idea and staked the welfare of the nation upon the nutritional health of its citizenry. In contrast to earlier social relief projects promoted by the imperial state and the local philanthropic initiatives of gentry elites, the Chinese Nutritional Aid Committee articulated an image of professional and specialised expertise in the science of nutrition and care. Theirs was a project of modern refashioning in which science played a key and foundational role in crafting their understanding of both relief and the children they aimed to save. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Life Movement is remembered in Chinese history primarily as the movement which Chiang Kai-shek launched in Jiangxi province in 1934 to change Chinese people's habits. This paper makes a different case: it argues that the New Life Movement and its organisations were central into the Nationalist Government's wartime mobilisation, and that the involvement of the civil servants through the NLM prevented the disintegration of society and administrative institutions under the impact of the war. This paper focuses on Chongqing and Chengdu between 1938 and 1942 and draws on archival materials and official reports to assess the scope of the Nationalists' wartime mobilisation. It analyses the involvement of the NLM organisations in the fundraising effort, in the mobilisation of women civil servants, and in the organisation of relief work in the first phase of the war and challenge the long-held view that the Nationalists' wartime mobilisation was insubstantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]