reviewed by Juan José Morales
15 June 2014 — The 100th anniversary of the First World War has prompted the publication of books that continue to shed light on the conflict, an upheaval whose consequences are still apparent today. The Great War had a significant influence in the development of modern China, shaping her attitudes toward her own sovereignty and her foreign relations in ways that still profoundly reverberate.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, China was emerging from millennia of dynastic rule that had ended in 1911 after the Xinhai Revolution, mired in political instability, warlordism and semi-feudal social and economic structures. The fragility of the newly-born republic was compounded by de facto colonial impositions: there were twenty-seven foreign concessions in Chinese soil where the Chinese government had no jurisdiction, while its economy was crippled by the huge indemnities imposed after the Boxer Rebellion. The situation became even more critical when in November 1914 Japan seized the German concessions in Shandong [see our review of The Siege of Tsingtao by Jonathan Fenby], a region of great strategic importance, with the acquiescence of the European powers, action that China had to witness helplessly.
In an attempt to alleviate those humiliating conditions, the Chinese government offered to aid the Allies with a contingent of labourers to be recruited by their representatives in China. Thousands left to support the Allies in Europe, by far the largest contingent of foreign workers to serve in the War.
Mark O’Neill, an author and journalist who has reported on China for more than three decades, brings these men to the history’s forefront. He benefits from his research on the records left by his grandfather, Rev. Frederick O’Neill, an Irish Presbyterian missionary who had lived in China since 1897 and who served in the Chinese general hospital at Noyelles-sur-Mer. The author also draws on the few scholarly monographs on the chinese labourers published recently by Xuo Guoqi, Li Ma, Brian Fawcett and Gregory James.
O’Neill succinctly describes the circumstances that led to the workers’ engagement, who they were, why they went, what they did and what happened to them afterwards.
The Chinese diplomatic efforts were led by Liang Shiyi. The French accepted the offer in June 1915, with whom Liang managed to negotiate basic rights and relatively favorable conditions for the workers. He had less success with the British, who accepted a year later—not coincidentally—during the Battle of the Somme.
Most of the workers came from North China, mainly from Shandong; the majority were illiterate and of very humble background. O’Neill begins with a letter by one of the few men whose name is known, Yuan Chun, and then recounts the relevant facts:
Yuan was one of some 135,000 Chinese men who were sent to France and Belgium between 1916 and 1922 to help the Allied war effort. They loaded cargoes, dug trenches, filled sandbags, repaired tanks and artillery; they laid railway lines, repaired roads, built ports and aerodromes; they removed animal carcasses and ammunition from the battlefield, collected the bodies of the dead and built the graves to bury them… 94,400 men worked for the British Army… 40,000 worked for France. Of this number, around 10,000 were ‘lent’ to help the American Expeditionary Forces… Around 3,000 of the workers died from injuries during bombing and shelling [and other causes]. At least 700 men died in German submarine attacks before they have even set foot in Europe.
Mistreatment and discrimination by the officers and the people of the countries these men were helping were unfortunately all too common. In protest against their working conditions, the laborers had to resort to strikes and mutinies, sometimes violently repressed.
One major difficulty was the acute shortage of translators, but there were institutions to support these workers too, like the YMCA and the WSM (Work Study Movement). There they celebrated Chinese festivals and received some education; volunteers also wrote letters for them, “as many as 50,000 letters a month were sent from France to China.”
Among those volunteers were bright young Chinese of privileged backgrounds and from scholarly families, men like Li Shizeng, James Yen or philosopher Lin Yu-tang. China’s social classes had lived completely apart from one another—a deep fracture that the writer Lu Xun had denounced as an obstacle to Chinese progress—but away from home they were to discover each other, and as O’Neill acknowledges, “The impact was greater on the Chinese intellectuals who engaged with the workers” than the other way around.
After the armistice, the Chinese laborers carried on the tasks of reconstruction until their contracts finished. Then, all those who served under the British had to return home. Those working for the French were allowed to stay: about 3,000 remained in France—years later some of those Shandong men crossed the border to join the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War [see our review of The Call of Spain: The Chinese Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)].
The memories of these men fell soon into obscurity even though their accomplishments were highly praised in their own day by the leaders of the nations they served. Marshall Foch said:
They were first-class workers who could be made into excellent soldiers, capable for exemplary bearing under modern artillery fire.
For the first time in modern history China had engaged in foreign affairs outside the country. The Chinese laborers’ contribution gained China a place at the victors’ parade and at the negotiating table at the Treaty of Versailles—although not on an equal footing and the Chinese representatives did not sign it.
However, the laborers’ participation did not achieve any purpose: nothing changed. The Chinese people’s aspirations were betrayed both by the Chinese government and the Western powers who maintained their own privileges in China and allowed Japan to retain the Shandong concessions; the Boxer indemnities continued to be paid until 1940.
This outrageous outcome sparked student demonstrations in Beijing on 4 May 1919, leading to what is known as May 4th Movement, entrenching the mistrust of Western powers as duplicitous, setting the country in search for its own path of modernization and in pursuit of a new national identity.
Juan José Morales writes for the Spanish magazine Compromiso Empresarial. A former President of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, he has a Master of International and Public Affairs from Hong Kong University and has also studied international relations at Peking University (Beida).
The Chinese Labour Corps: The Forgotten Chinese Labourers of the First World War, Mark O’Neill (Penguin China, March 2014)
From:http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1891&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter