The Inducsco Files at Columbia University: Primary Sources for the Wartime Gung Ho Movement

THE INDUCSCO FILES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITYa PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THE WARTIME GUNG HO MOVEMENT Douglas R. Reynolds In November 1983, the National Congress of the People's Republic of China officially resurrected Gung Ho, the movement for cooperatively-organized wartime factory production that was widely known outside of China as Indusco or, more fully, as the Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement (Zhongguo gongye hezuo yundong).[1) Less than a year later, the August 16, 1984 issue of Hon9qi, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, contained a substantial article by Bi Pingfei, acting president of the revived association, bearing the title of ••Gung Ho'--A Product of the Times.•[2) The highest levels of party and government have thus bestowed their official blessing upon this movement, old and·new. The old Gung Ho, founded in 1938, was merged in 1952 into the cooperative structure of the new Chinese government. Bi Pingfei's article describes briefly its founding rationale, wartime mission, and historical experience, as a prelude to his discussion of the need for •a new Gung Ho• and its future mission in China. The article draws attention to the central importance of co-founders Edgar Snow and Rewi Alley, working alongside the •progressive• Chinese Hu Yuzhi, Sha Qianli, Zhang Naichi, Xu Xinliu, and Song Qingling (Mme. Sun Yatsen .[3) It likewise mentions the support for Gung Ho production by such Communist Party luminaries as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu, Peng Dehuai, He Long and Ye Ting.[4) As a United Front instrument, .Gtmg Ho enjoyed Communist backing while headed in Chongqing by Nationalist Finance Minister Kong Xiangxi (H.H. K'ung) and sanctioned officially by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). •Friends development,• at home and abroad will be greatly interested in this Bi's article says about the new Gung Ho. American scholars have special cause for interest, even perhaps celebration. For, at Special Collections of Columbia University Libraries is the Indusco Files, 1938-1952 [5)--175 manuscript boxes of materials that constitute the fullest record anywhere in the world relating to the old Gung Ho, its growth and development, and the manifold problems and obstacles facing it. These files open a window onto Gung Ho of the past, and suggest lessons for Gung Ho of the future. Donated between 1952 and 1956 by the late Ida Pruitt, organizer and active head of Inducsco, Inc. in New York from 1940, the complete files are open now for scholarly use. 44 Between 1971 and 1973, this author spent several thousand hours sorting through and refiling, and then utilizing, the tens of thousands of items in the Indusco Files for his dissertation study, •The Chinese Industrial Cooperative Movement and the Political Polarization of Wartime China, 1938-1945.•[6] One byproduct of this effort was a listing of contents, in two parts: •summary Outline of Contents• and a box-by-box •skeleton List of Contents.• In looking over these lists, reproduced below, it requires no great leap of the imagination to see the rich research possibilities of the China correspondence, manuscript, subject, and photograph files for a fuller understanding of the last dozen years of Republican China, 1938-1949. Nor will specialists of U.S.-China relations fail to recognize the research opportunities of Indusco, Inc.'s u.s. correspondence and subject files, or the eleven file boxes of correspondence and materials relating to United China Relief, through which Indusco, Inc. received most of its moneys after October 1942 (see note in •skeleton List,• INDUSCO II.A.2, Box 107). This relationship with UCR and, through UCR, with the President's War Relief Control Board, reflects an important wartime development, namely, the governmentalization of u.s. relief which, to my knowledge, has not been researched (see Boxes 126, 136, and 145). These lists, in short, provide a ready introduction to a vast yet virtually untapped resource that can substantially enhance scholarly understanding of the late Republican era, and of u.s.-China relations in those turbulent years. Note that, in these lists, Chinese personal names follow the preferred anglicized forms of the user (J.H. Tan, Y.P. Hei, etc.), under which their correspondence appears in the Indusco...