Chinese Industrial Cooperatives

Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (Chinese: 工業合作社; pinyin: Gōngyè Hézuòshè) (CICs) were organisations established in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) to support China's war effort by organizing small-scale grassroots industrial and economic development. The movement was led by the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Association (CICA or Indusco), founded in 1938 by foreign and Chinese activists. Its international arm the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (ICCIC, also known by the nickname Gung Ho International Committee) was founded in 1939 in Hong Kong to promote cooperatives in China. The movement was especially active in the 1930s and 1940s with support from both left and right wings of Chinese politics. The movement disappeared after the 1950s after the establishment of the People's Republic of China government, but CICA and ICCIC were revived in the 1980s and are still active in the twenty-first century. In the English-speaking world, the industrial cooperatives' best known legacy is the term "gung-ho", which came to mean "overly enthusiastic," but had no relation to its meaning in Chinese, stemming from their shortened name (Chinese: 工合; pinyin: gōnghé; lit. 'to work together').