Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War by Guoqi Xu (review)

There is much that is worth reading in this first book-length study in English of Republican China’s participation in World War I; there is also much that is quite controversial. The brainchild of an influential politician, Liang Shiyi, the idea of sending Chinese labourers to help the French and the British on the Western front was well received by the latter, largely because mobilization and casualties had created a severe shortage of labour for both of them.

Furthermore, since private companies recruited these labourers at first, Germany could not accuse the Chinese government of violating a neutrality declared at the very beginning of the war in Europe. Recruited at home on the basis of written contracts, these Chinese had to pass stringent medical examinations and undergo training in China before they began their long odyssey to France either by the Cape of Good Hope, the Suez Canal, or – and that was the fate of most of them – through the Pacific Ocean and Canada, a delicate operation conducted in great secrecy by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and supervised by the Chief Press Censor of Canada, Colonel Ernest Chambers, and then across the Atlantic Ocean. Many of the Chinese had never seen the sea or boarded a ship and at least 700 of them lost their lives to German submarine attacks. The first contingent of labourers arrived in France in August 1916 and, as a sign of things to come, was not heartily welcomed by the French and British working classes.

Once installed on the Western Front, these approximately 140,000 Chinese contract workers, most of them illiterate peasants, faced numerous challenges. True, they were not called upon to take an active part in the fighting; nevertheless, they were often used in or near danger zones, even though their standard contract stipulated otherwise. They also worked in munitions plants, built and repaired roads and railroads, dug trenches (by far, their main occupation), fixed machines, transported military supplies, loaded and unloaded cargo, cleared the battlefields, drained camps and flying fields, and made duck boards for military purposes. Those serving under the British encountered further restrictions: they had to wear uniforms, their mail service was under military control, and, if they broke rules, they were subjected to court martial; they were also quartered in closely packed camps and, often, they did not have warm clothes and enough food. British authorities never considered the Chinese labourers their mental equals; rather, they maintained towards them a colonial attitude grounded in cultural misunderstandings and stereotyped perceptions (childish, dirty, mean, and bad) – in a nutshell, they evinced a general cultural arrogance that mutated into pure racist prejudice. Finally, for all of these Chinese, the lack of qualified officers and interpreters created serious management problems.

Their work did not end with the signing of the November 11 Armistice. Indeed, in its aftermath, they located mines and unexploded bombs, cleared away barbed-wire entanglements and picked up shell cases, moved live munitions and filled in trenches, tore down huts and buried the remains of dead soldiers (a practice that Chinese popular culture associated with extreme bad luck). Chinese labourers stayed in France until 1922. Altogether, around 3,000 of them died while serving the Allied cause. Looking at the number of war medals received and the amounts of pension money granted on behalf of Chinese deceased labourers, Xu concludes that these sacrifices have not received the recognition that they rightly deserve – hence his successful attempt to redress this denial of memory.

One redeeming feature, though, was the many social, educational, and entertainment programs provided by the ymca, which ran canteens, organized recreation activities (the Chinese labourers particularly enjoyed sports), theatrical groups and motion pictures, helped them deal with banking issues, taught them basic literacy, foreign languages, history (including the nature and meaning of the Great War), and geography, and offered Bible classes and Sunday services. All these initiatives, supported by military authorities that quickly...