Our Seven–Their Five: A Fragment from the Story of Gung Ho is a fictional work by Rewi Alley, the technical director of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Alley wrote this story in 1943, while living in a village in the Qinling Mountains of Shaanxi Province. He had recently returned from Hunan, where he observed famine conditions and the devastating effects of the Japanese advance. Drawing on these experiences, he produced a vivid portrait of ordinary life in wartime China. However, the book was not published until 1963, well after the Communist victory, at a time when Chiang Kai-shek was portrayed as a central antagonist of the people’s struggle. Reflecting that political context, Alley depicts the Nationalist regime as obstructing the cooperative movement, a view consistent with 1960s ideological narratives.
Our Seven–Their Five is not centered on one protagonist. Instead, the story follows a group of refugees from Hunan Province who flee famine and war to settle in a small town. There, they meet Fu, a cooperative organizer educated in Beijing, who helps them form a cooperative enterprise. According to the cooperative rules, at least seven people were needed to register a group, but the refugees were only five. They therefore joined forces with seven weavers to reach the required number—hence the title, “Our Seven–Their Five.” With support from the Cooperative Federation, providing loans and organizational guidance, they managed to launch a small but successful operation. Through teamwork and persistence, the refugees began to rebuild their lives.
Indusco Weaving Cooperative
The story stands out because it offers a rare ground-level view of wartime China. Rather than focusing on generals, political leaders, or major battles, Alley documents the daily realities of refugees, laborers, and peasants whose survival depended on cooperation. In his depiction, life and death coexist with unsettling normalcy: people die, yet work continues; tragedy is woven into the fabric of everyday endurance.
There is even humor. In one memorable scene, a foreign inspector visits a cooperative (clearly Alley himself), and local children gossip about how strange the foreigner looks, especially his long nose, which they imagine could dip right into his teacup. Moments like this humanize the story and reflect Alley’s lighthearted way of addressing cultural encounters.
Equally important is his refusal to reduce Chinese society to a simple Communist vs. Nationalist binary. Instead, Alley portrays a complex human landscape shaped by hardship, survival, and moral ambiguity. He writes with empathy for the refugees and displaced people, emphasizing their struggles to adapt to rural life amid famine, disease, and Japanese occupation.
The story also captures the class tensions and corruption that persisted even within the cooperative system. In one episode, we see a local landlord sponsoring a cooperative not out of solidarity but to gain easy access to credit and manipulate grain prices during a period of hyperinflation. Such moments reveal how some cooperatives, especially in Nationalist-controlled areas, were exploited as quasi-private enterprises rather than genuine collectives.
By highlighting these abuses, Alley underscores that the cooperative movement was not uniformly idealistic or successful. Some cooperatives functioned as large factories; others resembled small capitalist ventures; and still others truly fulfilled their mission of mutual aid and community resilience. Amid this uneven landscape, Alley still finds hope in the cooperative spirit and endurance of ordinary Chinese people.
Our Seven–Their Five was published by New World Press, Beijing in 1963
An Wei, a scholar and translator, first met Helen Foster Snow during her visit to China in 1978, when he was assigned as her interpreter. Their encounter quickly developed into a lifelong friendship. Moved by her work and story, An Wei took on the task of translating Helen Foster’s writings into Chinese and, during a 1985 stay in Hartford, Connecticut, gained access to her personal archive.
An Wei graduated with a degree in English in 1966. Amid the political turmoil of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was appointed an English interpreter at the Foreign Affairs Office of the Shaanxi Provincial Government. At the time, China received very few foreign visitors, and much of An Wei’s work involved studying Mao Zedong’s writings in English. In 1970, he was allowed to observe American journalist Edgar Snow’s visit to Yan’an from a distance because only senior cadres could attend these high-level missions. Despite the lack of direct interaction, An Wei was inspired to read more of Snow’s work. In 1971, after being reassigned to the Yan’an History Museum, he encountered additional English-language materials about China, including Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China and Helen Foster Snow’s Inside Red China.
By 1978, when Helen Foster Snow was preparing to return to China for a short trip, An Wei had resumed his position in the Provincial Foreign Affairs Office. Although he was not the first interpreter selected by officials, Helen Foster specifically requested his assistance due to his fluency in English and knowledge of revolutionary history. This request allowed them to travel together and marked the beginning of a deeper intellectual and personal connection.
Their correspondence continued after the trip, with Helen frequently asking An Wei to help publish her writings in China. In 1982, during a Chinese delegation’s visit to Minnesota, the group briefly met Helen Foster in her Madison home. An Wei’s access to her personal papers came during his residency as a Visiting Scholar at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, from September 1985 to September 1986. During that year, he visited her almost weekly and worked closely with her manuscripts. It was during this period that he also rediscovered the letters he had written to her, which he later published in Chinese.
An Wei served as a translator during numerous high-level diplomatic missions, including visits by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He has translated and published 18 books and more than 100 articles in both Chinese and international publications.
(Based on An Wei’s own account of his relationship with Helen Foster Snow in An Wei Wenji, 2013.)
One of the major accomplishments of Indusco (the American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives) was its international propaganda and fundraising campaign. In addition to publishing the monthly Indusco Bulletin in English to inform foreign supporters about cooperative activities, the Hong Kong-based International Committee for Chinese Industrial Cooperatives produced pamphlets, sent speakers abroad to advocate for China’s wartime cause, and organized fundraising events to support relief efforts. Indusco headquarters also published Chinese-language periodicals and pamphlets that featured workers’ and peasants’ testimonies to mobilize domestic support. While much of this propaganda relied on text, visual materials, such as photographs, drawings, and maps, played a crucial role in communicating the movement’s message.
This pamphlet, published by Indusco Inc., featured twenty original drawings by Jack Chen alongside a one-page narrative about the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. Priced at ten cents, it was sold along with other Indusco publications to help raise funds for the cooperative movement.
Among these visual materials, Jack Chen’s bilingual pamphlet stood out for its compelling depiction of the goals and accomplishments of the cooperative movement. The booklet, which included twenty original drawings illustrating the importance of industrial cooperatives during the war, was used not only for propaganda but also as a key fundraising tool, promoted widely through the Indusco Bulletin.
The drawings in the pamphlet highlighted the role of industry in China’s resistance to Japanese occupation.
Jack Chen (1908–1995) was one of the leading cartoonists in wartime China. Trained in art in Soviet Russia, he became a major advocate of socialist realism in Chinese art during the 1930s. Born in Trinidad to a biracial family, Chen used his status as a British citizen in China to bypass local censorship. He published widely in both Chinese and international media, organized exhibitions to foster exchange between Chinese and foreign artists, and supported China’s resistance through his artwork.
A communist sympathizer, Chen visited the Communist base in Yan’an in 1938 and wrote about the experience in the January 1939 issue of Asia magazine. He is perhaps best known for his later books, A Year in Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution, The Sinkiang (Xinjiang) Story, and The Chinese of America. His personal papers are held at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives in California. For a detailed study of his impact on the Chinese art world, see Paul Bevan’s A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle, and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926–1938.
The Chinese Exclusion Act marked a turning point in American history, as the nation began transforming from a country of immigrants into one of gatekeeping. What began as a series of measures regulating Chinese travel and entry evolved into a sweeping federal law that imposed a 10-year ban on the immigration of Chinese laborers, which would later be extended and made effectively indefinite.
Chinese immigrants were detained for weeks or even months at Angel Island for customs and immigration processing.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was not merely a measure to curb the influx of foreign individuals; it was a calculated effort to define the racial and cultural boundaries of the nation by criminalizing immigrant communities based on their racial otherness. During the exclusion era, Chinese and other Asian people were depicted as uncivilized men who abused their wives and trafficked women as prostitutes. The press portrayed them as cunning, immoral, and prone to crime. Every Chinese man or woman had to prove at the U.S. border that they were neither low-class laborers nor prostitutes. In other words, they had to prove their innocence before being suspected of any wrongdoing.
Background of Chinese Immigration to the US
In the 19th century, as slavery was abolished, the availability of transoceanic passages turned Asians, most of whom were victims of Euro-American colonization, into a potential replacement for slave labor. This led to the emergence of a new labor regime referred to as “indentured labor,” “contract labor,” or the “coolie trade.” Coolies were cheaper than slaves and, perhaps more importantly, were seen as a safeguard against the rising Black population in colonial territories after the Haitian Revolution, which deeply unsettled white colonists.
Between 1834 and 1930, more than 30 million South Asians left colonial India to work in British colonies across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean. While relatively few Indians reached the Americas, the Chinese became one of the first and largest Asian groups to migrate to North America.
The first Chinese immigrants to the United States were students and merchants, often sponsored by Christian missionaries. When these merchants returned to China with news of the California Gold Rush, hundreds of Chinese laborers rushed to the West Coast. Many traveled under a credit-ticket system, using future earnings in the U.S. to repay their passage to agents. This arrangement later fueled claims that Chinese immigrants were unfree laborers or “coolies.”
In 1864, when mostly Irish, white workers abandoned the grueling labor of building the Central Pacific Railroad, the company hired 50 Chinese workers as a trial. The Chinese proved so cost-effective that by the following year, the company employed around 15,000 Chinese laborers, making up nearly 90% of the workforce. Despite their key role, Chinese workers were excluded from Andrew Russell’s iconic photograph commemorating the completion of the railroad. A lesser-known image by the same photographer, taken minutes earlier, shows Chinese workers laying the final rail.
Andrew J. Russell’s “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying of Last Rail,” commonly known as “The Champagne Photo,” was taken on May 10, 1869. No Chinese worker is seen here.
As Chinese immigration increased, American politicians and capitalists faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they relied on cheap labor to build the nation’s industrial infrastructure. On the other hand, they sought to preserve the so-called purity of the white race. Believing that most Chinese were unfree laborers under conditions akin to slavery, they viewed their presence as a threat to foundational American ideals such as liberty. The outcome was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Pearl S. Buck’s China writings
While anti-Chinese bias ran rampant in the U.S., one woman, raised in China by a missionary family, helped open new cultural windows through her writing. In 1930, Pearl S. Buck published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind, portraying the struggles of Chinese women trapped in traditions such as arranged marriage and foot-binding. One of her protagonists is a Chinese man who travels to the U.S., marries an American woman, and faces family rejection. A story that hints early on at Buck’s literary commitment to bridging the Eastern and Western cultures.
Buck’s second novel, The Good Earth, which narrates the story of a Chinese farmer, became the best-selling book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and paved the way for her Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. The novel had a major impact on American perceptions of Chinese people. In a private letter, journalist Helen Foster Snow described Buck’s greatest achievement: “Buck was able to communicate with the West in universal terms so that she for the first time gave Westerners the sense that the Chinese were human like us and comprehensible.” (Letter to Jane R. Cohen, May 18, 1978, Randolph College Special Collections)
Having spent much of her youth in China, Buck left at age 42 after a divorce and a break with her religious upbringing. She devoted her years in the U.S. to increasing public sympathy for China and raising her adopted children at her Pennsylvania home. In 1935, she married her publisher, Richard John Walsh (1887–1960), who became her closest partner in foreign policy activism during the tumultuous years of World War II.
World War II gave Buck renewed purpose in advocating for the Chinese cause against Japanese occupation. With the U.S. and China now allies against fascism, Buck and Walsh became leaders of wartime citizen activism to influence American policy in East Asia. Buck served on the board of United China Relief, founded the East-West Association, and launched Asia magazine to foster American support for China. She corresponded directly with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, advising her on China-related matters. Buck’s vision extended beyond humanitarian relief: she championed Indian independence as a way to strengthen China’s position, advocated for anti-racist military policies to boost nonwhite soldier morale, and spoke out in defense of Japanese Americans facing racial discrimination.
Repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act
Within her broader mission to create a more just world, Buck viewed the Chinese Exclusion Laws as antithetical to American wartime alliances and the core values of human dignity and equality. Her husband, Richard J. Walsh, served as president of the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion and Place Immigration on a Quota Basis. The group successfully lobbied for the repeal of the exclusion laws, resulting in the Magnuson Act of 1943. This legislation repealed thirteen exclusion acts passed between 1882 and 1913, set a quota of 105 annual Chinese immigrants, and granted Chinese residents in the U.S. the right to naturalize.
Richard Walsh’s letter to the committee urged active advocacy to ensure the bill’s passage.
When signing the bill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized the symbolic and strategic significance of lifting the ban: “An unfortunate barrier between allies has been removed. The war effort in the Far East can now be carried on with a greater vigor and a larger understanding of our common purpose.” (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Statement on Signing the Bill to Repeal the Chinese Exclusion Laws. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.)
Although restrictions on Chinese immigration would persist in various forms, the activism of Pearl S. Buck and others helped remove a major stain on America’s democratic ideals.
Asia magazine was originally published as the Journal of the American Asiatic Association to promote commercial relations between China, Japan, and the United States.
The cover of Asia magazine from 1943
The American Asiatic Association was founded in June 1898 by a group of New York-based American businessmen who had previously lived in Asia. Their goal was to shape public sentiment to support American interests in the Far East.
The first issue of the Journal was published on July 25, 1898. It featured information on Chinese customs revenues and trade regulations along the Yangtze River. The final issue under the original title appeared on January 2, 1917.
From its inception, the Association was focused on protecting American business interests in the Philippines and opposed any peace treaty with Spain that did not guarantee an “open door” policy, which would ensure equal trade opportunities for all nations on the islands. Other early topics included Chinese railway projects, Korean trade, the strategic and economic importance of China, and reports from association events.
In 1917, with the 17th volume, the Association relaunched the publication as Asia magazine. Now a monthly, it featured more opinion essays and illustrations. Although its core mission—to promote American influence in Asia—remained unchanged, the editors acknowledged the need to reshape American perceptions of Asia. This shift is reflected in their statement: “The ignorance of our people in regard to the countries of the Far East is unquestionably a serious obstacle to the legitimate extension of American influence” (Asia, March 1917, p. 3). To that end, they began emphasizing social and cultural topics alongside economic and political concerns. That same year, the Association began admitting women as members.
In November 1917, in compliance with the Post Office Appropriation Act of August 24, 1917, the magazine disclosed its ownership: Asia Publishing Company, with A. W. Feidler and G. H. Rennick as trustees, and Willard Straight as the principal bondholder. By the 1920s, the magazine listed Willard Straight as its founder in the front matter.
After Straight died in 1918, his widow, Dorothy Straight, married Leonard K. Elmhirst in 1925. Together, they continued to publish the Asia magazine. During this period, the journal adopted the subtitle “The American Magazine on the Orient.”
In 1933, Pearl S. Buck’s husband and publisher, Richard Walsh, became the journal’s editor. In 1941, Buck purchased the magazine from the Elmhirsts and rebranded it as Asia and the Americas in 1942. Under her leadership, the magazine increasingly focused on political analysis and war reporting. Prominent contributors included William Ernest Hocking, Hu Shih, Owen Lattimore, Lin Yutang, Jawaharlal Nehru, Edgar Snow, and Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow). Buck regularly wrote for the book review section.
In 1947, Asia and the Americas merged with Free World (October 1941–December 1946) and Inter-American (May 1942–November 1946) to form United Nations World.
China in WW2 