Commissioned Purchasing and Consignment Sales in Wartime Cloth Supply: Grassroots Cooperative Operations in Western Jiaodong, 1941–1943

A Case Study Centered on Yexian County

Abstract

This article investigates the linkage between the fragmented household textile production and the concentrated wartime demand by the grassroots cooperatives in Yexian County as an important node in the western sector of the operation of the Jiaodong anti-Japanese base area during the period 1941–1943. However, instead of seeing cooperatives as political mobilizing groups, the study examines the institutional aspect of “commissioned purchasing and consignment sales,” which involved the registration of the household capacity, supply of yarn and working capital, collection and inspection of cloth, price settlement, and distribution to military, administrative, and civilian markets. Process tracing and institutional analysis relies on contemporaneous economic reports, regional economic histories, the Laizhou/Yexian gazetteer and comparative research on Communist base areas. It suggests that the cooperative decreased search, information and bargaining costs through the process of making standardized, transportable and heterogeneous household products into lots. This meant that it worked on the basis of a two-way chain that went both ways: the cloth went up and the raw materials, payment, orders and quality information went down. But the same organizational proximity that reduced transaction costs also meant that military urgency and cadre mobilization would make the distinction between voluntary exchange and administrative requisition not so clear cut. Thus, the Yexian case is an example of the potential and the internal strain of cooperative institutions established during the war. What they did do was to reorganise markets under blockade to make possible an alignment with political goals and household incentives and supply security, albeit temporary.