Gung Ho Newsletter No.100
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Gung Ho Newsletter September 2013 No. 100 · ICCIC members visit Cooperatives in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia……1 本 · Sichuan Ya'an Earthquake Donation …………………………………2 期 · Visit to the Kanglejia Community Service Development Center …2 要 · Third Executive Meeting of the ICCIC in 2013 held in Shanghai ……2 目 · SACU / SCA Delegation Meet ICCIC Members and Visit the BBU …3 · ICA Global Conference and General Assembly Video ………………5 · Looking Into the Chinese Mirror …………………………………5 ICCIC Members Visit the Cooperatives in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia The ICCIC Chair, Michael Crook and member Fan Minjian visited rice growing cooperatives in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia on August 6-8, 2013. Left 2:Fan Minjian,Right 3: Michael Crook Right 1:Zhang Yunguang Sichuan Ya'an Earthquake Donation At 08:02, on 20 April 2013, an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale struck the county of Lushan in Ya‟an Municipality, Sichuan Province. The International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives - ICCIC - called upon its members and friends to demonstrate their Gung Ho spirit by making generous donation to the victims to help them through these hard times, and rebuild their homes. Donations from several members totaling 44,787.11 CNY has been delivered to the victims through Sichuan Charity Federation. Thank you very much for your donation. (Donation Name list on our website) 1 Visit to the Shanghai Kanglejia Community Service Development Center September 17th, ICCIC Executive Members Guo Lulai, Zhang Gaoling, Secretary General Yu Xiaohong, ICCIC Staff and Shanghai members visited the Shanghai Kanglejia Community Service Development Center, which operates over 30 activity centres for the elderly in Shanghai. The Mao Lijun Introduced the information president of Kanglejia, ICCIC member Mr. Mao Lijun showed the visitors around. The Third Executive Meeting of the ICCIC in 2013 held in Shanghai On September 18, 2013,the Third Executive Meeting of the ICCIC in 2013 was held in Shanghai, attended by Michael Crook, Dave Bromwich, Jin Guoming, (representing Song Zhendong, who was in hospital recovering from an operation), Yu Lin, Li The Third Executive Meeting of the ICCIC in 2013 Zhiming, Guo Lulai, Li Zhonghua, Tao Yong, Zhang Gaoling, Secretary-General Yu Xiaohong and Vice- Secretary General Li Jinguo. 2 The Third Executive Meeting of the ICCIC in 2013 SACU / SCA Delegation Meet ICCIC members and Visit the BBU On September 26, 2013, about 20 ICCIC members gathered in the Beijing Bailie University (BBU) to welcome the delegation from the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) and Scotland China Association. This meeting was attended by about 100 people, including the ICCIC members, representatives from the SACU, the ICCIC Member, the BBU teachers and students and the SACU representatives from the Scotland-China Association (SCA), teachers and students from the BBU. Chairman of the ICCIC Michael Crook and President of the BBU Yu Lin gave the opening address followed by speeches by Jenny Clegg, Vice-President of SACU, Janice Dickson, Chair of the SCA, Zoe Reed, Chair of the SACU, and two members from the SACU delegation. The ICCIC Advisors Isabel Crook, Lu Wanru and Tang Zongkun also attended. The former International Secretary of CIC Peter Townsend made tremendous contributions to the Gung Ho movement during the anti-Japanese war. Peter's daughter Catherine also with the SACU delegation. The ICCIC the ICCIC Advisor Isabel Crook and Catherine presented calligraphy to Catherine, in memory of her 3 father Peter Townsend: “Ambassador for Anglo-Chinese friendship, Bearer of the Gung Ho spirit! (英中友好使者,传承工合精神) the ICCIC Chair Michael Crook and the BBU President Yu Lin Gave the Opening Address the ICCIC Advisor Lu Wanru talked with the SACU Delegation Michael presented the calligraphy to Catherine 4 ICA Global Conference and General Assembly Video On 1st - 5th November, 2013, ICA Global Conference and General Assembly was held in South Africa, more information please click here: http://www.thenews.coop/video Looking Into the Chinese Mirror Peter Townsend1 My first contact with China came when I was eight or nine.We were living in Canterbury, in Kent in England, and one evening there was a meeting at the Odd fellows Hall.The subject was the situation in China.The speaker, I have always thought, was Eugene Chen, Finance Minister in Sun Yat-Sen‟s administration (whether it was Mr. Chen I can‟t confirm). I was sitting in the front row of the audience.My father was chairman. My father had once been a Baptist, but had converted to Quakerism with my mother.He was also a socialist, a member of the local Labour Party, and a pacifist.In the First World War a mob had torn the hosting from under him while he was delivering an anti-war speech.But he had developed an interest in the Sino-Japanese conflict and at the time the London Times was covering that conflict and occasionally ran a small map of the part of China where the Long March was taking place.We used to study those maps at the breakfast table. My next contact was less direct.At my prep school I became captain of hockey and fell under the tutelage of a Mr. Hawker.He had been a member of the British national hockey eleven and was spending a year‟s leave from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company teaching at the school. He took an interest in me because of my love for hockey, but he also inspired in me an interest in the East and introduced me to poets such as Rumi. It was then that one Saturday afternoon - Saturday afternoons 1 Peter Townsend was International Secretary of the CIC from the late 1940s to 1952. After his return to England, he became a famous art critic. 5 were always devoted to sport - I gathered the hockey players together on the field and announced that we‟d form two teams, one Chinese, one Japanese, and play out the Sino-Japanese conflict.Chinese to the left.Japanese to the right.‟ No one moved to the left.All crowded to the right.Those years, of course, the British government supported and helped to arm the Japanese.The Chinese were regarded as second-rate and fruit for missionaries and traders.I was chagrined and angry and under my orders the players split into two and played according to my designation, but it was a useful lesson. The third time was when in November 1937 my brother Will, an artist, took me to an exhibition in London of Chinese wartime woodcuts.By then I was seventeen. Some years later I came to know Mme.Sun Yat-sen in Chungking and at her house I met Chou En-lai.His English was excellent and we got on well.He thought I might make a good bridge partner. Unfortunately I don‟t play bridge, so instead he encouraged me to take an interest in contemporary woodcuts and presented me with my first one, by a Szechuan artist.That started me collecting.My collection of about 250 woodcut items is now in the Australian National Gallery. Those years were a time of great political conflict in which almost all of us became involved at one extreme or another. The British government did not confront German or Italian fascism effectively or willingly.Nor did it oppose Franco in Spain, the Japanese in China, or the Italians in Ethiopia.My family, for its part, veered leftward.My brother Will, the painter, worked voluntarily for an organization that supported the Spanish Republicans.That‟s how I came to study Spanish with a Spanish refugee.My aunt, a professional pianist, became involved in Jewish relief agencies.That‟s how I came to study the violin with a refugee from Vienna.Some of our leaders wanted us to compromise, to comply with the aims of Hitler and Mussolini.That pushed many of us further towards the left.My brother Robert, an architect, became a devout Communist. (He eventually left the Communist Party, upset by Stalin‟s trials, and after a period in the wilderness sought to satisfy his desire for the Absolute by joining the Catholic Church, in which he rose to deacon, as high as he could go without disposing of his wife).I, too, formed a political discussion organization at my school, an elderly public school which had included among its pupils Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright, Walter Pater, the 19th century aesthetician, and Somerset Maugham the 20th century novelist.We - or at least some of us - listened to parliamentary or other politicians, discussed the political scene, imagined that we were more important than we were. Then the war came. I was just back from a hitch-hiking trip to France and Belgium.At one 6 point, outside Perpignan, I had got a lift to Paris from a couple of men who had escaped from a Franco detention center and climbed over the Pyrenees, only to find their army call-up papers waiting for them. I was on vacation from Oxford where I had been studying history for a year and I didn‟t go back.Instead of returning there, under the influence of my parents (but not their prodding, for fortunately they thrust no religion down my gullet) I volunteered for the Friends Ambulance Unit, a Quaker-1ed pacifist group. On January 1, 1940, I began my training in driving, emergency „first-aid‟ practice and so on, in a tent on an estate owned by the Cadbury family, chocolate magnates and stalwarts of the Quaker establishment. Once that training was completed I served in hospitals in various cities and in military hospitals, including one that received many patients from the British retreat from Belgium and Northern France.