The Research On Jiangsu Rural Cooperatives In The Republican Period(1927-1937)

Cooperation system originated from the socialist movement of Western Europe in the middle of the19th century and was introduced into China with some western thoughts like Marxism around the May4th New Cultural Movement. It underwent the process of from drawing experience from overseas to practicing it at home, from theory study to pilot project, from cities to rural areas, from the spontaneous movement by the folk patriotic intellectuals to advocating it on a large scale by the Republican government through politic means.Numerous peasants in Jiangsu province went bankrupt in the Republican period and the livestock is in short supply, which caused the low production efficiency of agriculture and the continuous expansion of the wasteland area. At the same time, the agriculture production was influenced by the dumping of the foreign agriculture product and the natural disaster. All these pushed the rural economics into collapse.In order to stabilize the regime and recover the taxable capacity of the rural area, the Republican government used administrative top-down means to carry out the rural cooperatives movements in Jiangsu province firstly. Because Jiangsu province is the political center of the Republican government, economic places of importance and the base of regime, Jiangsu rural cooperatives started earlier and developed more rapidly with full range than others. The rural cooperatives underwent two periods with its own unique characteristics and its flourish development was due to the following aspects:the measures introduced mainly by the government and the active methods by the Farming Band and the rural cooperatives such as establishing the special management organization, attaching importance to cultivating talent, increasing spending on the rural area etc.Comparatively, Jiangsu rural cooperatives in the Republican period made good achievements, help release the financial crisis to some extent, enhance the skill of the peasants, promote the technology advance, facilitate the rural reforming and push forward agriculture modernization. However, there were imperfections as follows:the quantity of the rural cooperatives member were comparatively low, the rural cooperatives distributed unevenly, the quantity and the quality were inconsistent. Furthermore, the development lacked coordination, the cooperatives developed fully but play a limited role. All these caused the limited credit and existence of usury in the rural area.By the year1937, the political situation became worsen all over the country, some places became Japanese colony and the feudalism oppression existed in the rural area. All these leaded to the difficulty in the development of Jiangsu rural cooperatives. The lack of developing fund, the inefficiency of the supervising system and all above external factors leaded the collapse of Jiangsu rural cooperatives. From the positive and negative aspect of Jiangsu rural cooperatives development, the thesis sum up experience and lessons and is useful to the development of Jiangsu rural cooperative in future.