Israel Epstein and Gung Ho in His Late Years

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On May 26, 2006, sad news passed on to me: another witness of modern Chinese history, the esteemed old comrade israel epstein passed away.

Only a month ago, his friends and former colleagues had gathered in Beijing in the Great Hall of the People to celebrate his 90th birthday, listening attentively to his speech and enjoying the gift copies of his newly published memoirs and selected reportage. The familiar voice seems still resounding in my ear, yet all that has turned to be part of one’s remembrance...

Comrade Epstein is a renowned journalist in international media circles, highly regarded as a well-informed and knowledgeable veteran newsman with remarkable achievement in this field. However, very few people have noticed that he had also been a sincere supporter of the gung ho movement initiated by Rewi Alley and Edgar & Helen Snow during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. In addition, he had played an important part in his late years in serving the revived Gung Ho as vice-chair of the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (ICCIC) in Beijing.

During the 1930s, Epstein, whileworking for the China Defense League (CDL) under Mme. Soong Ching Ling, he also helped as publicity secretary of the ICCIC headquarters in Hong Kong, mainly writing and editing publicity pamphlets for Gung Ho. When the CDL moved to Chongqing at the end of 1941, he resumed his work for the League, but his newly married English wife Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley was made the special coordinator of Gung Ho in the War capital. Taking advantage of Chongqing as the centre of communication between the interior and overseas, she undertook the liaison task between the northwest Gung Ho depots with the ACIC (Association of Chinese Industrial Cooperative) central office in Chongqing and the ICCIC in Chengdu. She did such a good job in keeping the declining Gung Ho functioning for 2 more years till the end of the War under extreme difficulties.I had not realized that until Eppy showed me a package of copies of old letters that Elsie used to keep. I found there are some 130 letters from Rewi to Elsie and vice versa between 1943 and 1944, averagely 1 in every 2-3 days. The letters referred to urgent demand for funding coops or paying staff salaries, the distribution of financial aid from overseas, internal personnel conflicts, as well as discussions on Gung Ho direction and policy under the fast-changing and uncertain War situation before V-J Day... One can see the tremendous amount of work they had to handle every day and the difficulties they had to surmount. Yet they fulfilled their duty with all their heart and might. I trust that was why Eppy repeatedly said it was not he, but Elsie whose merits in wartime deserves the appreciation of all Gung Ho men.

In the 1980s I met Eppy often at various functions welcoming foreign guests or in commemoration of old friends of China. My impression was that Eppy looked more a courteous scholar than an enquiring and responsive journalist, even less active than Elsie on public occasions. This instant impression of mine changed with our working-together experience in the revived ICCIC. By and by I came to know an Eppy with firm conviction, quite open-minded, and sharing the same fine quality of dedication to the cause he committed as all old Chinese revolutionaries, giving no thought to personal fame. He was very conscientious in whatever he promised to do, drafting all his speeches and reports himself, and never refused to help correct or polish English documents when asked. His modesty and his spirit of being scrupulous about every detail in ordinary work became a good example for all ICCIC officers.

When the ICCIC resumed its activities in 1987, everyone was doing his/her job in a way of “feeling stones when crossing the river”. I presume even Rewi Alley who had experienced the rise and fall of Gung Ho and spared no efforts to revive it in his last years, was not sure about how to adapt Gung Ho to a China in transition from planned economy to socialist market economy, and what would be the best way to further the cause. The glorious success of Gung Ho movement was a past. The major leaders of Gung Ho and the people Gung Ho served during the War of Resistance have gone through 1-2 alternations of generations. The difficulty and complexity of restarting the movement from scratch was understandable. When Eppy was elected vice-chair of the ICCIC, he began playing his role by doing petty affairs, giving substantial help to what the coop needed most. He assisted the Beijing Handicapped Youth Paper-cut Cooperative by purchasing one to two hundred New Year cards they made each year for his own use, and setting up a stand at the Friendship Hotel. Eppy lived in the hotel then, and with his help, the coop got special permission by the hotel manager to sell the cards in the lobby to foreign residents and tourists at good price. The cards with beautiful traditional Chinese designs were very popular among foreigners that the coop won quite a number of orders later from lovers of Chinese handicrafts overseas. The coop members were so pleased and most grateful for Eppy’s promotional efforts. It was also a good publicity for people to know that Gung Ho was in action again.

The ICCIC started in 1989 its first major project of promoting 3 Gung Ho experimental cooperative centres in Shandan (Gansu), Honghu (Hubei) and Longkou-Penglai (Shandong). Eppy participated with great enthusiasm in various activities for inspection and experience exchange, and helped introduce channels for overseas support. He took lead in spreading the traditional Gung Ho slogans of “work & work together” and “all for one & one for all” to inspire the coop members. At the executive meetings, he always stressed the need for ICCIC to persist in promoting genuine cooperatives along the line of international acknowledged coop principles, and, explored together with other Committee members the theoretical and practical problems in promoting cooperatives in China today.In August 1993, Eppy went to Baoji in Shaanxi on behalf of the ICCIC to attend an international forum on Gung Ho sponsored by the Party Committee and the Government of the city. Baoji was where the northwest Gung Ho headquarters located during the War and was known as “Gung Ho Garden City” for organizing diversified coops for production and community service. The Bailie School for training Gung Ho workers was in Shuangshipu (now Fengxian County), a small town southwest to the city. Both Rewi Alley and George Hogg, the English headmaster of the school, lived once in a cave dwelling there. Eppy was keen to attend the Forum in the hope of revitalizing this old Gung Ho centre. To his disappointment, he saw the local authorities had little awareness of the differences between the Gung Ho coop based on “of the people, by the people and for the people” principles, and the collective enterprise or shareholding coop then prevailed in the area. Their real interest lay in making Gung Ho an access to attract foreign investment for boosting the local economy. Apparently there is a long way to go before anything like a Gung Ho garden city can be reproduced in Baoji.

In autumn of the same year, Eppy led an ICCIC delegation to Spain for a survey tour of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. This visit had a great impact on Eppy's hope for furthering Gung Ho in China. He was much inspired by their admirable achievements:no workers in the MCC cooperativeslost their jobs during the post-war depression in Spain;the automobile parts they manufactured had good market for they were up to the standard for use in Ford and Benz cars; the MCC set up its own cooperative bank to provide financial services not only to the MCC cooperatives but to the local community;the coop members got an income higher than those in similar enterprises as a result of their system of distribution―to each according to his work plus dividends from his shares, while the managers were paid relatively less than those in private enterprises, thus reducing the income gap between workers and managers.In a word, by relying on its economy scale, elastic strength, high efficiency, fine quality of products and democratic management, the MCC has proved that cooperative economy can be equally competitive in the market economy in the West. If this can be done in capitalist country, why not in socialist China? He believed we could do it even better!

Soon after this visit, Eppy wrote in the CPPCC journal (Zhengxie Bao, Dec. issue, 1993) that cooperative economy belongs to the sector of socialist economy under collective ownership by the working people according to the Constitution (1982). But there is no Cooperative Law to define the nature, the rights and obligations of cooperative, as well as to whom the property of cooperative belongs. Now it is an urgent matter to have the status of cooperative legislated by the state. Having elaborated the nature and principles of cooperative, and the historical role of wartime Gung Ho, he proposed that the current relationship between the cooperative and the state should be one based on “run by the people, support by the state”. This relationship should be clearly stated in the Cooperative Law of the PRC. Although this proposal has not yet been brought into the agenda of the CPPCC and the NPC, it heralds the persistent appeals in the cooperative economic circle demanding the legislation of cooperative economy in China.

Despite the project of writing the biography of Soong Ching Ling which was prior to all other things in his late years, Eppy managed to put on his work agenda as many as possible ICCIC meetings, workshops and even trainings for the coop members at grassroots. At these gatherings he would be found listening to every speaker very attentively and taking down notes when necessary. In August 1997, ICCIC executive members and leading members of the 3 experimental cooperative centres met in Shandan to celebrate the centenary of Rewi Alley’s birth. Eppy was 82 then and had difficulty in getting about, yet he insisted in traveling with us for over 20 hours from Beijing to Shandan by train. The train arrived at 2 o’clock in the morning. With little sleep, he joined us in the visits to the Shandan Bailie School, Rewi’s former residence, the museum for Rewi’s donated historical relics, and Alley and George Hogg graveyard all in one day, unwilling to miss any of them. In a moving speech he made at the commemoration, Eppy summarized his views on the significance and the necessity for promoting cooperative today, repudiated the argument that Gung Ho success was possible only because of the lack of commodity supply in wartime, and that it could no longer work as China was getting modernized with abundant commodities and growing market competition.He listed a number of positive roles that cooperative can continue to play, for instance, providing job opportunities to the laid-off workers and rural surplus labour, producing simple farm implements and daily necessities in the low-income region, participating in modern scientific and technical activities in urban areas, and engaging in service trades like maintenance, transport, and processing, etc. Since the workers are concurrently share holders in the coop, and democratic election of managing committee and open accounting and distribution systems must be practiced, it is more secure for the coop to prevent the corrosive influence of bribery, corruption and waste in management. Eppy also mentioned the problems confronting Gung Ho: lack of publicity of cooperative’s role in the media; shortage of young coop workers; no sufficient financial resources for coop promotion and for organizing training of trainers, and, no access to get administration expenses for the ICCIC office as a NGO. He ended his speech by calling on once again: “We need a Cooperative Law”!

In the past 20 years, the older generation of Gung Ho leaders like Rewi Alley, Dr. Chen Hansheng, and Lu Guangmian (K.M. Lu) had gone one after another.The good efforts of Eppy in revitalizing Gung Ho in his later years will remain an ever lasting memory on and encouragement to all Gung Ho workers. I believe Eppy would have been happy to find that the new leadership of ICCIC elected at the 3rd General Assembly is advancing with full confidence to meet all challenges and opportunities in developing cooperative economy in the future. The recent promulgation of the Farmers Specialized Cooperative Law of the People’s Republic of China has greatly invigorated the spirit of all cooperative supporters. The characteristic role of cooperative in economic, social and educational fields has begun to draw more public attention to China’s new socialist village construction programme. The dream of Eppy that “China must have a Cooperative Law” is bound to realize one day in this land he dearly loved.

(Revised on March 2, 2007)