I was not long in doubt, however, for on a little side street I came upon the office in question and found the two men who were leaders of the movement, Although both were ex tremely busy they greeted me warmly and invited me to have lunch with them and also share their rooms for the night in case my bus back to Changshu did not leave that day—an offer which, by the way, I was very grateful to have received, for they had anticipated conditions correct The foreigner, Mr. Raymond Holcomb, and the Chinese, Mr. Lee Wang-pei, had both been engineers in Canton but had joined the ce-operatives at the request of Mr. Alley, Associate Director of the Association, who had, they informed me, lived at one time in Shanghai.
During our Chinese meal they spoke eagerly and at great length of the progress of their work to start needed industries in the rich but backward Kiangsi region. They were working closely with the Kiangsi Refugee Relief Association and the Bureau of Rural Reconstruction which had mapped out the district 25 miles south at Taiho for land development by refugees. But farm placement was only a small portion of the present need, for goods were wanted in large quantities immediately for the people of the region who were now cut off from outside sources of supply.
It was to fill this requirement that rice and tea country, but now the brown, hard stalks of beans and wheat push through the soil. Everywhere there are people moving, most of them the tail end of the Yangtze Valley refugee groups.
These are the poorest of course, those who could afford to move hav-io go out to visit the ce-operative shop for making small river boat On the way my two guides showa me Japanese goods in the local stores, such as enamelware, silk stockings, cotton towelling, soap and matches, all of which had penetrated into this far-away district under Chinese or cher trade marks, The things were cheap, and since people had come to depend on them, their buying habits had become fixed. One of the hardest tasks, as Mr. Lee pointed out, was to educate the people into not buying Japanese products and thus supporting the war against their own land and livelihoods; it was the argument pretty generally that to use cheaper Japanese articles allowed more money to go for supporting the Chinese cause, for the people did not understand that they themselves could
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.