- 8.
18
Here
tell you about one project which must have an especial
appeal for you, and which needs your help and counsel.
I refer to the movement recently launched in China to re-build
our light industries throughout the interior, in the villages
and in the towns, in the form of industrial co-operatives.
Japan destroys not only our families and their homes
but seeks above all to destroy our modern industries, hoping
to make our people her agrarian slaves. By fire and by
sword she has already smashed or seized about 75% of our
machine industry. She has rendered jobless more than a
million of our industrial workers. In answer to this
Japanese holocaust we have not lost hope but our people and
our Government have determined to re-build, even during war,
the productive power Japan has demolished. We are going to
set up, throughout the hinterland, even on the flanks of the
railways held by Japan, thousands of small factories. And in
order to mobilize the widest participation of our people in
the commcn struggle, in order to give meaning to their
sacrifices and to give the movement its most democratic
character, it is being developed in the form of co-operatives
as a partnership between the Government, the workers, and the
consumers.
With industrial co-operatives we hope to absorb large
numbers of refugees and divert millions of dollars of funds
from unproductive refugee relief camps in the Japanese areas,
where our destitute countrymen are merely kept alive until the
Japanese wish to exploit them. Industrial co-operatives can
maintain economic stability, and a market in the interior,
avoid chaos and banditry in the villages, even if the Japanese