China Student Sees Country Strong Despite U. S. Neglect

China's long-fighting, long-suffering people, faced with a United Nations policy of concentrating on the European front, a policy which has caused Lin Yutang to call China "The Forgotton Front," has not fallen back into its thousand-year sleep. So says Shouchang Pu. 1G, a Chinese citizen who cites as evidence the Chinese Industrial Cooperative, an organized movement of the civilian population, which has played a large part in keeping Japan's original victim in the war on the Allied side.

When the Rising Sun came up over the Burma Road, most Americans visualized an eclipse of China's war effort. The main reason why his country's star continued to rise in spite of the stoppage of the flow of supplies, Pu explains, is that the Chinese Industrial Cooperative, inaugurated in Hankow in 1933 with a government grant of $5,000,000, served the three-fold purpose of maintaining army morale, stimulating civilian morale among millions of harassed refugees from occupied Chins, and mobilizing manpower, capital, and natural resources.

Pu, whose scholastic odyssey can be traced from Shanghal University to a B.A. degree at Michigan and then to Harvard last September in search of an M.A. under the Economics Department, explained this Cooperative movement in terms which were a reminder of his special field, labor problems.

This cooperative movement, Pu explains, which turns out $7,000,000 worth of war materials a month, can be broken down into three main divisions: the First Line comprising 200 cooperatives along the battle fronts which helps the army and the guerilla fighters maintain themselves and also provides a market for Chinese farmers who would otherwise be compelled to sell to the Japanese; the Second Line comprising 1000 cooperatives operating in the remaining unoccupied regions of China's Southeast and Southwest; and the Rear Line in China's far west which concentrates on heavy, permanent industry.

Pu, who is studying labor problems with an eye to the expanding industrial development which is visualized for his country, and in which he believes the cooperative movement will loom large is also enthusiastic about the educational and medical facilities which are being developed under the movement.