Mass- and Elite-Based Strategies for Cooperative Development in Wartime Nationalist China: Western Views on the ‘Gung Ho’ Industrial Cooperative Experience

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Clegg

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 China’s 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 China’s 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.

Author(s):  
Anne Gessler

The introduction frames the book as a critical intervention in the current debate about the role of alternative grassroots models in modernizing mainstream political and economic structures. After framing the political and theoretical issues at stake in New Orleans’s cooperative movement, the introduction outlines how historical local cooperatives interact with transnational cooperative principles to improve their community, expand opportunities for civic participation, and reform systems of governance. Each chapter’s case study represents consumer, producer, or distribution cooperatives that manifest different visions of ideal capital-worker relations and are inspired by local and international utopian socialist, Rochdale, and hybrid racial justice cooperative models. Each example is constitutive of black, working-class, female, and immigrant residents particular subject positions and economic needs. Consequently, the book articulates and debates citizens relationship the state, an ideological drama that plays out in the city’s social spaces to either propel or retard larger challenges to capitalism.


Author(s):  
Ayokunle Olumuyiwa Omobowale

Most of the discourse on development aid in Africa has been limited to assistance from Western countries and those provided by competing capitalist and socialist blocs during the Cold war era. Japan, a nation with great economic and military capabilities; its development assistance for Africa is encapsulated in the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) initiative. The TICAD started in 1993 and Japan has so far held 5 TICAD meetings between 1993 and 2013 during which Africa’s development challenges and Japan’s development assistance to the continent were discussed. The emphasis on “ownership”, “self-help” and “partnership” are major peculiar characteristics of Japan’s development aid that puts the design, implementation and control of development projects under the control of recipient countries. This is a major departure from the usual practice in international development assistance where recipient countries are bound by clauses that somewhat puts the control of development aid in the hands of the granting countries. Such binding clauses have often been described as inimical to the successful administration of the aids and development in recipient countries. Though Japan’s development aid to Africa started only in 1993, by the 2000s, Japan was the topmost donor to Africa. This paper examines the context of Japan’s development aid to Africa by analyzing secondary data sourced from literature and secondary statistics.


Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Croce

AbstractThis article addresses the call of the Psychology of Global Crises conference for linkage of academic work with social issues in three parts: First, examples from conference participants with their mix of bold calls for social transformation and realization of limits, a combination that generated few clear paths to achieving them. Second, presentation of Jamesian practical idealism with psychological insights for moving past impediments blocking implementation of ideals. And third, a case study of impacts from the most recent prominent crisis, the global pandemic of 2020, which threatens to exacerbate the many crises that had already been plaguing recent history. The tentacles of COVID’s impact into so many problems, starting with economic impacts from virus spread, present an opportunity to rethink the hope for constant economic growth, often expressed as the American Dream, an outlook that has driven so many of the problems surging toward crises. Jamesian awareness of the construction of ideological differences and encouragement of listening to those in disagreement provide not political solutions, but psychological preludes toward improvements in the face of crises.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. e15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Maercker ◽  
Rahel C Bachem ◽  
Louisa Lorenz ◽  
Christian T Moser ◽  
Thomas Berger

Background Adjustment disorders (also known as mental distress in response to a stressor) are among the most frequently diagnosed mental disorders in psychiatry and clinical psychology worldwide. They are also commonly diagnosed in clients engaging in deliberate self-harm and in those consulting general practitioners. However, their reputation in research-oriented mental health remains weak since they are largely underresearched. This may change when the International Statistical Classification of Diseases-11 (ICD-11) by the World Health Organization is introduced, including a new conceptualization of adjustment disorders as a stress-response disorder with positively defined core symptoms. Objective This paper provides an overview of evidence-based interventions for adjustment disorders. Methods We reviewed the new ICD-11 concept of adjustment disorder and discuss the the rationale and case study of an unguided self-help protocol for burglary victims with adjustment disorder, and its possible implementation as an eHealth intervention. Results Overall, the treatment with the self-help manual reduced symptoms of adjustment disorder, namely preoccupation and failure to adapt, as well as symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Conclusions E-mental health options are considered uniquely suited for offering early intervention after the experiences of stressful life events that potentially trigger adjustment disorders.


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