On The Agricultural Cooperative Movement During The Period Of The Nationalist Government Of Nanjing

The agricultural cooperative movement which the Nationalist government of Nanjing initiated began in the 1930s. With the Kuomintang regime collapsing on the mainland China, the movement ruined accordingly. It can help us draw its lessons to our present rural modernization construction to understand and analyze the reasons of the failure of the agricultural cooperative movement at that time. The paper studies from the following aspects:The first part gives a retrospection on the exploring of cooperatives by the initial reforming figures and organizations. The exploration effectively influenced on the agricultural cooperative movement which the Nationalist government advocated and carried out later.The second part studies how the cooperative movement was advocated by the Nationalist government, the development of its different phases and reasons of the development of the movement.The third part sums up the characteristics of the cooperative movement. Its main business was credit cooperation, and with other functions such as political, military and social functions and it lacked stable sources of funds. Furthermore, the cooperatives were not voluntarily organized by theirs members but mainly by coercive measures.In the fourth part, the paper analyzes the merits and shortcomings of the cooperative movement. Although the movement played an active role in making up the rural finance and relieving the famine, developing agricultural production and supporting the Resistance War against Japan and reforming rural society to a certain extent, generally speaking, the role was very insignificant because itneither solved the exhaustion of rural finance nor improved the peasants' life.In the last part, the thesis makes a detailed analysis on the reasons for the failure of the campaign from various angles. The reasons for it failure were the turbulence of political situation, successive wars, corrupted government, the unsolved problem of land, the deviation from the principle of cooperation and the poor quality of the cooperatives themselves etc.The thesis finally makes a full evaluation of the cooperative movement. In spite of little effect on recovering and developing the rural economy, it was the Nationalist government's beneficial attempt to promote our nation's agricultural modernization.