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

Unlike the Second World War, China's participation in the First World War is little known. Initially neutral, China did not declare war on Germany until mid-August 1917. Its major contribution was to send 140,000 contract workers to France to free up Allied soldiers for the battlefront. Two-thirds of the Chinese workers were recruited by the British; one-third, by the French. When the United States joined the war, also in 1917, the French assigned about 10,000 of their Chinese laborers to the Americans. For the British and Americans, the Chinese transported munitions and dug trenches; for the French, they worked in factories. When hostilities ended in November 1918, the Chinese stayed behind for close to two more years, clearing still-live ammunition and burying dead soldiers' bodies.

The French and British recruited the workers separately. The French did so through a Chinese intermediary, the Huimin Company; the British, through their own agents. Most of the recruits were in their twenties and thirties and came from northern China. Their term of service was either three years (with the British) or five (with the French). They were apparently all men. The two sets of contracts are reproduced at the back of the book. Their experiences may profitably be compared and contrasted with those of other overseas Chinese.

The book seems to be an elaboration of a chapter in the author's monograph, China and the Great War: China's Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization. It bears a similar title with another of his recent publications, Wenming de jiaorong: Huagong he diyici shijie dazhan (A fusion of civilizations: Chinese laborers and the First World War), though to what extent the work under review overlaps with its Chinese predecessor is unstated. There is yet an earlier study of the topic in Chinese, Chen Sanjing's Huagong yu Ouzhan (Chinese laborers and the European war), but Xu Guoqi's is the first book-length treatment in English.

A prodigious amount of research has gone into this book. The archives that the author consulted include the No. 2 Historical Archives in Nanjing, the British National Archives in Kew, the Imperial War Museum in London, the University of Leeds Library, the French Foreign Ministry Archives in Paris, the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, the YMCA Archives in Minneapolis, and the Canadian Library and Archives in Ottawa. Contemporary periodicals in Chinese and English were another major source.

One of the interesting findings of the book is that the sending of Chinese laborers to Europe predated China's declaration of war on Germany and that the initiative came not from the manpower-starved French and British but from the Chinese themselves, specifically from Liang Shiyi, an advisor to President Yuan Shikai, in response to Japanese intimidation. According to the author, "the Japanese Twenty-One Demands made China determined in 1915 to win a place at the eventual peace conference" (p. 14). The way to bring this about was for "workers to take the place of soldiers," as Liang Shiyi put it. When Liang proposed the idea to the Europeans, the French accepted promptly and the British less readily. The first French-recruited workers reached Europe in August 1916; the ones recruited by the British had arrived by April 1917. As a result, China did win a place at the postwar peace conference, but, as is well known, it failed to persuade the other conferees to stop Japan from taking over the German concessions in Shandong.

If the research for the book is faultless, the same cannot be said for its content. First of all, the book leaves out two major aspects of the story of the Chinese workers on the Western front. One is "the social and everyday lives of these laborers," with the result that much of the book focuses on how they were "managed" rather than on what they themselves did during...