The important New Life Movement (_Hsin Shêng-huo Yün-tung_) is, strictly speaking, not a Party organization; but Chiang is its Chairman, and in purposes and personnel it interlocks with the Party. Convinced that institutional and economic reform required accompanying moral and ideological reform, the Generalissimo founded an Officers' Moral Endeavor Corps as early as 1927. This organization was placed, soon after its initiation, in the hands of Colonel (now Major-General) J. L. Huang, a graduate of Vanderbilt University and an experienced Y.M.C.A. secretary. The Corps' purposes were comparable to those of a Y.M.C.A. with American armies, but Chinese morality in general, not Christian sectarian teaching, was stressed. With Chiang's encouragement, the Corps came to include a high percentage of the officers. Teaching cleanliness, truthfulness, promptness, kindness, dignity, etc., it helped build morale. In 1934, after seven years of war against the Communist-led agrarian insurrections in South Central China, the Generalissimo decided to extend to the whole people the type of work done by the Corps. On February 19, 1934, he made his first speech announcing the New Life Movement and on the following March 11, a mass meeting of about one hundred thousand people, representing five hundred organizations, signalized the formal inauguration of the movement.[9] From then on the Movement was continued as a regular phase of anti-Communist reconstruction. It elicited praise for its attempt to reach the roots of China's political demoralization, and its intent to remedy the everyday life of the people,[10] although there was skepticism as to its effectiveness in removing troubles deeply ingrained in the economic system. [Footnote 9: The China Information Committee, _News Release_, March 4, 1940. English translations of names such as the New Life Movement, Officers' Moral Endeavor Corps, National Spiritual Mobilization, etc. are often awkward or jejune where the original is not.] [Footnote 10: Young, C. W. H., _New Life for Kiangsi_, Shanghai, 1935, is a missionary work which praises the New Life Movement highly. The book includes interesting, first-hand, unfavorable accounts of the rule of the quondam Chinese Soviet Republic, and explains some of the opposition to the Communists. The interconnection between Communist-suppression and the New Life Movement is consciously and clearly demonstrated.]