Poor Relief in China’s Early Cooperative Movements

: Membership in the Cooperative of China International Famine Relief Commission

Abstract

Can a mutual aid organization that is based on the principle of reciprocity fully include poor people ? The purpose of this article is to investigate the background and circumstances that made it impossible for cooperatives to successfully include poor peasants, with a focus on the cooperatives’ membership, through a case study of the rural credit cooperative operated by the China International Famine Relief Commission （CIFRC）. First, operating on the understanding that the most important factor leading cooperative management to failure was “undesirable persons” （buliangfenzi）, CIFRC strictly limited membership in the cooperative to “good persons” （haoren）. This made it difficult to include the poorest peasants since they had few achievements to prove themselves to be “good persons”. Second, CIFRC recognized the importance of “connection and face” （qingmian） in Chinese social life as the reason why “undesirable persons” could not be admitted to membership in cooperatives. In reality, historical materials in this case suggest that “connections and face” played important roles in establishing cooperative organization. If so, it is conceivable that the result was to exclude poor peasants from membership of cooperative organizations since they lacked “connections and face”.