Introduction

1In April 2010 China Central Television’s international English-language channel (Channel Nine) broadcast a six-episode documentary in its series ‘New Frontiers’ hosted by Ji Xiaojun on the 130,000-plus Chinese workers recruited by the French and British governments during World War One. In portentous tones Ji Xiaojun boldly announced in the first episode that the World War One Chinese workers ‘stood shoulder to shoulder’ with British and French troops to combat German military aggression, and that in the process 20,000 of them were killed. Such a valuable contribution to the Allied victory, Ji continued, was not fully acknowledged by France and Britain until fifty years after the end of the war. Overall, the programme depicted the episode as a shining example of China’s positive and beneficial interaction with the world predating the current era of China’s ‘globalisation’ (in Chinese referred to as duiwai kaifang or ‘opening up to the outside world’) that is declared to have begun with the post-Mao market reforms launched in 1978-1980. In fact, the China Central Television (CCTV) programme signalled an extraordinary revival of interest in the story of World War One Chinese workers, which – notwithstanding the programme’s reference to the tardy recognition of the Chinese workers’ contribution by Britain and France – had long been marginalised or completely ignored in China itself, a fact conveniently overlooked by the CCTV documentary.

2After briefly detailing the wartime role of the Chinese workers and the ways in which it was described by Chinese officials and intellectuals at the time, this chapter will explore the reasons why the entire episode of the allied recruitment of Chinese labour was completely ignored after 1949 in China, and why there has been such a resurgence of interest in the World War One Chinese workers in contemporary China. It is worth noting, however, that such a phenomenon parallels a similar ‘rediscovery’ in France today of the World War One Chinese workers. The predominantly Eurocentric approach to World War One that characterised much of French (and western) scholarship until relatively recently meant that in France it was not until 2010 that the first major international conference on the role and experiences of Chinese workers in wartime France was held, jointly organised by the University of the Littoral in Boulogne and In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium and resulting in a major French-language publication two years later.1

3In many ways, the story of the World War One Chinese workers in China today has been subsumed within larger narratives and discourses concerning China’s positive and ‘civilising’ interaction with the rest of the world both in the past and the present, especially with regards to the ever-increasing Chinese worker and entrepreneurial migration to Russia, eastern Europe and Africa. Such valorisation of China’s historical and contemporary interactions constitutes the flipside to Chinese commentators’ equally ubiquitous view of its historical interaction with the West (especially during the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries) as one of ‘national humiliation’ [guochi]. The chapter concludes that amidst the contemporary celebration of the World War One Chinese workers, significant aspects of the episode are wittingly or unwittingly overlooked.

Chinese Workers and World War One

4Who were these Chinese workers, and what role did they play in World War One? In an important way the Chinese government perceived the contribution of Chinese labour to the allied cause as a handy substitute for the country’s military participation. Although various Chinese government leaders proposed on three separate occasions between 1914 and 1917 China’s military engagement in the war, lukewarm responses from the United States and Britain put paid to that prospect (China eventually formally declared war against Germany in August 1917, but this was merely to legitimise the allied sequestration of German property and shipping in China; it allowed, however, for China’s presence at a future peace conference).

5The Chinese workers, mostly illiterate or semi-literate peasants from northern China (and especially from the provinces of Shandong and Hebei), were recruited by France and Britain from 1916 onwards with the full agreement of the Chinese government in a context of chronic labour shortages in France as growing numbers of men were called up to fight on the western front; the Chinese workers also replaced British dockworkers in French ports so that the latter could return home and enrol in the army. They were employed in a wide variety of war-related work, both behind the lines and at the front. Those recruited by France worked in government-run munitions plants and privately-owned metallurgical, chemical and construction firms located in north-western and central France (Brest, Le Havre, Bourges, Le Creusot, Saint-Chamond); those Chinese workers under British employ (known as the Chinese Labour Corps) were mainly located in north-western France and Flanders, and were allocated a diverse range of tasks in transportation, machinery maintenance, road repairs, and aerodrome construction. Significantly, much of the unloading at docks on France’s northwestern coast was carried out by British and French-employed Chinese labour; in some ports, such as Dieppe, nearly all the cranes were operated by Chinese workers. By the end of the war many of them were also involved in digging trenches and burying the war dead.2

6The Chinese workers in World War One France constituted a large proportion of all foreign overseas labour (primarily from the colonies) utilised during the war. This was especially the case with those recruited by Britain; thus the nearly 95,000 under British employ represented about 50 % of its overseas labour, which included 92,000 Indians, black South Africans, Egyptians, West Indians and Fijians. Although the French government principally looked to its colonies in North Africa and Indochina (180,000 Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, and Vietnamese), the Chinese workers recruited by France (totalling 37,000) still represented a sizeable component of its overseas workforce. The British-employed Chinese workers (with three-year contracts) were all repatriated by 1920, while those under French employ (with five-year contracts) were not repatriated until 1922. Some of the latter, however (perhaps as many as 2,000) remained in France after 1922, and some amongst them married local women. The last surviving World War One Chinese worker living in France died in March 2002 (aged 105) in La Rochelle.3

7Finally, it should be emphasised that in a wider context, the Chinese worker presence in World War One France was part of a much larger non-white foreign labour force, the first time in effect that France had hosted a significant number of racially different migrant workers. Prior to World War One, France’s foreign workforce had mainly comprised immigrants from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, who tended to be employed in agriculture in the country’s border regions. During World War One migrant labour was now deployed both in major cities (eg Lyon, Rouen) and smaller centres of war production that had had no peacetime tradition of hosting foreign (especially non-white) workers. For the first time French society experienced large numbers of non-white workers in its midst. At the same time France, again for the first time, deployed in Europe 500,000 colonial troops (troupes indigènes) from west Africa, north Africa, Vietnam and Madagascar. As increasing tension between racial prejudice of all kinds and long-cherished ideals of republican universalism and egalitarianism became ever more fraught during the course of the war, the unsettling and ‘alien’ skin-colour, languages, customs and religions of the colonial workers and soldiers gave rise to a more concrete sense of national identity as essentially white. In the final analysis, as one historian has observed, the presence of colonial (and Chinese) labourers in World War One France and how they were perceived by the host society transformed French ‘xenophobia’ (which had earlier targeted European immigrants) into ‘racism’.4

8In the immediate aftermath of the war Chinese officials, diplomats and intellectuals spoke of the Chinese workers’ role in the allied victory in grandiose terms. A song composed by a member of the official Chinese delegation attending the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 hailed the World War One Chinese workers as the active and confident benefactors of world peace and harmony (the words of the song, in Chinese and French, appeared in a French-language journal published in China).5 In 1920 Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), a professor at Beijing University and one of the co-founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, highlighted the unstinting toil of the World War One Chinese workers as a typical example of the diligence and courage of China’s labouring classes; just as Chinese labour migrants in Australia and North America had contributed to the ‘opening up’ of the world, Chen maintained, so the World War One Chinese workers had played an equally significant ‘internationalist’ role.6 Two years later T.Z. Tyau (Min-ch’ien Tyau), a technical adviser to the Chinese delegation at the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva and a lecturer in international law at Qinghua College in Beijing, in a book entitled China Awakened, glorified the contribution the World War One Chinese workers had made to the ‘cause of freedom and democracy’, insisting that the gratitude felt by the allied nations and their publics was such that ‘the world may be almost said to be lying at the Chinese labourers’ feet’.7 Furthermore, Tyau confidently predicted that in the future they would bring unimaginable economic benefits to China and the world. Firstly, just as Chen Duxiu praised the historical role of pioneering Chinese labour migrants in ‘developing’ the New World and Australasia, Tyau claimed that the returning World War one Chinese workers would use their experiences and skills ‘to reclaim and colonize China’s thinly populated frontier, to develop the country’s iron and steel industry, to build roads and railroads that shall connect the different parts of the Republic, and in a general way to help make China more prosperous, more united physically as well as morally’. Secondly, he suggested that the returning workers in the post-war period might also fulfil a pressing need (on a strictly contractual basis) for agricultural labour in north America (California) and Hawaii – thereby not only contributing to the boosting of agricultural productivity but also, he hoped, to tempering the hostile attitudes towards Chinese migrants in the United States that had been manifest since the 1880s.8 The Chinese press at the time was also fulsome in its praise for the Chinese workers’ ‘diligence’ and ‘endurance’, and their potential to enhance the country’s economy on their return.9

9Public spectacle also highlighted China’s role in World War One and the country’s alliance with the entente powers. On November 28, 1918 an extraordinary event took place within the grounds of the Forbidden City (the former imperial palace before the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912), when President Xu Shichang (1855-1939) presided over a parade of allied and Chinese troops in celebration of victory over Germany (China had officially declared war on Germany in August 1917, although it took no direct part in the fighting). In his speech to the assembled troops Xu Shichang did not specifically refer to the part played by the Chinese workers but clearly associated China with the entente powers by declaring the common cause to which both sides were dedicated of ‘right over might’ and world harmony.10 Several months later, at another ‘victory parade’ in Shanghai’s French Concession (an area acquired by France in 1849), nine hundred Chinese workers recently returned from France joined in the march along Avenue Joffre (renamed Huaihai Road after 1949).

10Occasional articles in the Chinese newspaper and periodical press in the 1920s and 1930s continued to highlight the ‘glorious’ role played by the World War One Chinese workers in assisting the entente powers to resist militarism (especially at a time, during the 1930s, when China confronted increasing Japanese aggression).11 Also, as some of the French-employed Chinese workers who had remained in France after 1919 began returning to China in the 1930s, contemporary Chinese press reports proudly referred to them as ‘our workers who participated in the European War’ [woguo canjia Ouzhan huagong].12

Post-1949 Representations of the World War One Chinese Workers

11After the establishment of the Chinese People’s Republic in 1949, and for much of the Maoist period (1949-1976), the story of the World War One Chinese workers was virtually ignored. Post-1949 Maoist historiography perceived the allied recruitment of Chinese workers in World War One simply as a minor and shameful episode in the longer history of western imperialistic exploitation of an enfeebled China dating from the 1840s. Since these workers were portrayed as passive ‘coolies’ and ‘cannon fodder’ [paohui] serving the interests of nefarious imperial powers, there was little scholarly interest in exploring in more detail the political context of the recruitment or the lives and activities of the workers themselves in France. It is especially notable that the first (and to date the only) full-length Chinese-language study of the World War One Chinese workers did not appear until 1986, and even then it was published in Taiwan rather than the People’s Republic.13 As late as 2002 a major study of the history of Chinese migration to Europe included only a short section on the World War One Chinese workers, reiterating the conventional Maoist view that they were the hapless and coerced victims deceived into going to Europe to serve ‘as cannon fodder’.14 Not surprisingly, when I met scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in the summer of 2000 during the course of my research, I was advised that the recruitment was merely one example amongst many of China’s victimisation at the hands of foreign powers and thus did not merit any serious historical study.

12In the immediate post-Mao period after 1976 the episode was still largely forgotten, principally because more official and scholarly attention began to be paid to the Chinese work-study movement in France – a scheme organised by Chinese Francophile intellectuals with the support of French officials and educators that sent nearly 1,500 Chinese students to France in 1919-1921 to gain work experience and study in French schools and colleges.15 Since a number of future Chinese Communist Party leaders such as Li Lisan, Chen Yi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping had themselves been work-study students, it is not surprising that the activities of these work-study students became a primary focus of mainland Chinese scholarship; two comprehensive documentary collections on the movement were published in the late 1970s and 1980s.16 In the 1980s and 1990s, also, there was always more interest in the experiences and views of Chinese diplomats, consular officials and scholars who travelled to the West during the latter half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century.17 Although a ten-volume documentary collection on the historical experiences of Chinese overseas workers primarily in Southeast Asia, North America and Africa appeared in 1984, it contained only a short section on the Chinese workers in World War One France.18 Moreover, only a very few scattered and frustratingly thin memoirs compiled by former World War One Chinese workers or interpreters appeared during the half century after 1949. Thus Zhang Bangyang, a student interpreter attached to one of the Chinese Labour Corps battalions, drew attention in the 1960s to the naivety of the workers and their ill-preparedness for the brutalities of the Western Front, while Yan Zhensheng in the 1990s remembered the harsh discipline imposed on the workers by British officers at Noyelles-sur-Mer (at the mouth of the Somme in western France), the largest camp for the arriving Chinese workers under British employ.19

13There was one intriguing exception to this late twentieth-century casting of the World War One Chinese workers out in the cold. A very brief 1987 report in the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, Renmin ribao [People’s Daily], on the Chinese Cemetery just outside Noyelles-sur-Mer maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (and in which 877 Chinese workers are buried, nearly 400 of whom perished during the Spanish flu epidemic that ravaged Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war), claimed with great satisfaction that the 168 domestic tourists who had signed the visitors’ guestbook between June and November 1986 had expressed their gratitude for the contribution of the Chinese workers to the allied victory and that the French people would never forget them. Such sentiments, the report concluded, were ample proof that people all over the world were ‘linked in their hearts’.20

The ‘Rediscovery’ of the World War One Chinese Workers at the Turn of the Millennium

14At the turn of the twenty-first century, a more robust Chinese official and scholarly interest in the World War One Chinese workers and the tendency to accord the episode a more positive spin began to be clearly evident. An emerging valorisation of China’s involvement in World War One represented a total negation of Maoist historiography and its Leninist-inspired condemnation of the war as an internecine struggle between equally rapacious imperialist powers. In terms not dissimilar to those employed by TZ Tyau in 1922, the World War One Chinese workers were increasingly viewed as active contributors to democracy and world peace. In 2008 the Archives Bureau of Weihai (or Weihaiwei as it was known earlier) in Shandong province (the port from where many of the Chinese workers embarked for Europe since it was then part of a British leasehold territory acquired in 1898 and not returned to Chinese sovereign control until 1930) sponsored an international conference commemorating the role of the British-recruited Chinese workers, the Chinese Labour Corps; significantly, an earlier exhibition on the port’s local history organised in 2000 contained no information at all on the World War One Chinese workers. In the conference volume published the following year in 2009, one of the Chinese contributors portentously declared that the World War One allied recruitment of Chinese labour constituted an important chapter in the history of both human civilisation and East-West relations.21 A later English-language study of the World War One Chinese workers by the same contributor, in effect a reworking of an earlier Chinese-language study in 2007 commissioned by the Chinese government (the ‘News Office’ of the State Council), insisted (in absurdly hyperbolic terms) that not only was the contribution of the Chinese workers to the allied victory the most significant of all the non-European conscripted and recruited personnel (workers and soldiers), but also that the Chinese workers played an important role in China’s emerging ‘internationalisation’ after the war allowing the country to become a ‘key player in a new international political system’.22 It might also be noted that the 2010 CCTV documentary referred to earlier asserted that ‘20,000’ Chinese had been ‘killed’ during the war, a gross exaggeration since in all probability the total number of Chinese who died during the war, including those who perished on the journey to and from France, did not exceed 5,000 – and the cause of death for many of them was illness (Spanish flu or tuberculosis).

15In 2014 and 2015 two more major landmark publications appeared in China signalling the revived interest not only in the role played by Chinese workers in World War One but also in the relevance of World War One to modern China’s diplomatic, political, intellectual and economic history. The former is a translation of the French-language volume referred to earlier, while the latter is a collection of papers (predominantly by Chinese scholars) on the impact of World War One on Chinese intellectual thought, China’s diplomatic strategies at the Versailles Peace Conference, the financial and economic implications of the war for China, and how the war affected Sino-Japanese and Sino-Russian relations.23

16The ‘rediscovery’ and valorisation of the World War One Chinese workers in contemporary China is closely associated with the wider Chinese official agenda in the last few years that seeks to highlight China’s historically beneficial global interactions before the current era – and thus setting the context for China’s ‘peaceful rise’ in the present and pointing the way forward to the potential benefits of the country’s ever-growing presence in the global economy (and hence quieting any fears that China’s neighbours might have of its potential for exercising aggressive hegemony in the future). The dramatic change in how the World War One Chinese workers were now perceived in the twenty-first century was foreshadowed several years earlier in connection with representations of Chinese ‘coolie’ labour during the nineteenth century. In 1991 a metal sculpture (donated by the Governor of Illinois) was unveiled in Shanghai to commemorate the Chinese workers who had helped build the First Transcontinental Railroad in North America. Originally known as the Pacific Railroad, it was built between 1863 and 1869 and linked the Pacific coast with the eastern rail network in Iowa. Significantly, the Chinese caption at the foot of the sculpture pointedly referred to the ‘heroic’ Chinese workers, who had played a key role in facilitating the unity and economic development of the United States. In 1999 the Chinese Communist Party chairman Jiang Zemin, in a speech given at the State Council’s Overseas Work Conference, also made the point that the Pacific Railroad would never have been built without Chinese labour.24 Similarly, a short history of Chinese overseas workers published in 2000 highlighted the pioneering contributions of nineteenth-century Chinese ‘coolie’ labour to the modernisation of Cuba and Peru.25

17At the same time contemporary discourses since the turn of the twenty-first century of current Chinese overseas migration (especially of workers and entrepreneurs) are very much couched in terms of a significant contribution to ‘civilised’ development.26 From the 1990s to early 2000s up to 400,000 Chinese (mostly workers, shopkeepers, and retail merchants) migrated to Russia, 50,000 to eastern Europe, and several hundred thousand to Africa. Over the longer period between 1978 and 2009 nearly 5 million Chinese workers went abroad (at the end of 2009 there were 772,000 Chinese workers in 190 countries).27 These migrants are perceived in official Chinese discourse as the vanguard of Chinese modernity and culture playing a role in the modernisation of their host countries as well as of China itself. As a recent study has observed, the trope of the enterprising Chinese migrant helping to modernise poorer developing countries (as well as stagnating western economies in eastern Europe for example) exists simultaneously with a domestic ‘civilising’ agenda that targets remote areas of the country as well as ethnic minorities.28 Stories in the ‘new migrant literature’ of the 1990s and 2000s set in western Europe likewise portray Chinese migrants providing the flexibility, industry and vision that western countries need, while those set in eastern Europe and Africa unabashedly portray Chinese migrants as the harbingers of development.29 In other words, overseas Chinese workers today are seen as agents of a new ‘global’ China that benefits the world. As a Chinese commentator noted in 1992 Chinese labourers abroad ‘made a good name for themselves in the international labour market through their uniquely Chinese industry, hardiness, kindness, respect for the law and morality’,30 although in recent times the responses of the host countries and their peoples to the growing Chinese labour presence have been decidedly more ambivalent in certain cases.31 The valorisation of the active and positive role played by the World War One Chinese workers is clearly intended to dovetail with this wider discourse of overseas Chinese migration.

18At the same time such a discourse parallels contemporary academic discussion in China that characterises imperial China as the benevolent centre of a harmonious East Asian system of international relations before the coming of the West in the nineteenth century not only began China’s gradual and humiliating decline, but also brought with it a new approach to international relations based on ruthless and amoral struggle and competition. On becoming leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 Xi Jinping spoke of the ‘China Dream’ (Zhongguo meng), which looked forward to the rejuvenation of the country that would witness a return to the pursuit of peace [heping], concord [hemu] and harmony [hexie] that Xi believed had always been a feature of China’s imperial past. The ‘China Dream’, in Xi’s view, would thus not only enrich and benefit the Chinese people but also the people of the entire world.32

Overlooked Aspects of the Chinese Recruitment

19Notwithstanding the contemporary celebration of the World War One Chinese workers as part of a wider agenda of highlighting China’s beneficial interactions with the world in the past, however, significant aspects of the episode are completely overlooked. Firstly, the Chinese government’s active support of, and involvement in, the French and British recruitment of Chinese labour in World War One represented the culmination of a trend dating from the late nineteenth century that illustrated changing Chinese official perceptions of overseas Chinese labour. From at least the tenth century, Chinese migrants (mainly from the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian) who had begun going overseas (principally to Southeast Asia) to improve their livelihoods were the objects of suspicion and fear on the part of Chinese rulers and officials. Not only were they perceived as persona non grata abandoning the embrace of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ (i.e. the ‘civilised world’) but also as potential troublemakers who might participate in rebellion if they returned home or engage in piracy along China’s coastal regions. During the Ming and Qing dynasties (14^th to 18^th centuries) a series of imperial edicts had even officially proscribed migration overseas.

20In the nineteenth century such an official ban (which would remain in effect until 1893) did not deter western agencies in Portuguese Macao or Chinese treaty ports such as Xiamen and Guangzhou (where westerners had immunity from Chinese jurisdiction because of the privilege of extraterritoriality) from recruiting, often forcibly or by deception, nearly 250,000 Chinese indentured labourers to work primarily on sugar plantations in Cuba, Peru, and British Guiana (as well as in the British and French Indian Ocean possessions of Mauritius and Réunion). Initially, the Qing dynasty central government evinced little concern over the iniquities of this ‘coolie trade’ (1840s to 1870s) as it became known; in official discourse the ‘coolie’ labourers were contemptuously referred to as zhuzai [swine or piglets], while the holding pens (or ‘barracoons’) erected by British and Portuguese firms in Hong Kong and Macao to examine potential ‘coolie’ recruits were known in Chinese as zhuzaiguan [pig-pens]. A significant turning point in official attitudes occurred in 1873-1874, when the Qing government, galvanised into action by persistent reports from local Chinese officials (especially in Guangzhou) of the appalling conditions and treatment experienced by these labourers, sanctioned an official Chinese mission to Cuba to investigate the injustices of the ‘coolie trade’ and collect oral testimonies from the labourers themselves. This led to a treaty with Spain (Cuba’s colonial ruler) in 1877 and the opening of a Chinese Consulate in the colony’s capital, Havana, to oversee the welfare of Chinese migrants; the subsequent opening of Chinese consulates in the United States (to where thousands of Chinese migrants had gone following the California gold rush of the 1840s) was also motivated primarily by this aim. Such an initiative marked a new kind of Chinese foreign policy that had hitherto demonstrated little inclination to protect the interests of overseas Chinese or, in a wider sense, to accept the necessity of Chinese diplomatic representation abroad.

21The British recruitment of nearly 64,000 Chinese labourers to work in the Witwatersrand gold mines in the Transvaal (South Africa) between 1904 and 1906 was governed by the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1904 that enshrined the principle of transparency (i.e. the text of the indenture or contract had to published openly in the Chinese press and had to specify duration, wage rates and number of working hours), guaranteed labourers free medical assistance and paid passage home after the expiry of the contract, and provided for the appointment of Chinese official inspectors at embarkation points and in South Africa. These conditions were also to be included in the British and French contracts during World War One.

22Further evidence of this novel Chinese government concern with the situation of overseas Chinese labourers can be found in its dealings with Germany in the years preceding World War One, when Chinese workers were recruited to work on tobacco plantations in the German colonial possessions of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland) and Western Samoa. In Sino-German negotiations that took place after the turn of the twentieth century, for example, the Chinese government (both that of the Qing dynasty and the Chinese Republic that replaced it in 1911-1912) frequently criticised German colonial policy for placing Chinese ‘coolies’ in status below that of ‘natives’ (which allowed colonial planters to insist on flogging as a legal means of punishment for the Chinese workers). As in the case of Cuba, the Chinese Minister in Berlin (Sun Baoqi) in 1907 advised Beijing to open a consulate in Samoa (which, in fact, occurred in 1910), while two Chinese commissioners were sent there to inspect working conditions for the Chinese labourers; their critical reports were published in the local Chinese press in 1908.33

23It is also significant that Sun Yatsen, provisional president of the newly established Chinese Republic at the end of 1911, specifically informed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in March 1912 that the new Republic had to be constantly vigilant in protecting the interests of overseas Chinese migrant labour. Such a concern, Sun observed, was integral to the government’s duty of ‘respecting people’s rights’ [zunzhong renquan] and ‘protecting the national reputation’ [baoquan guoti].34 In 1917, soon after the Chinese government had approved the British and French recruitment of Chinese workers in World War One, it created a new official department – the Bureau for Chinese Overseas Workers [qiaogong shuju]; under the jurisdiction of the Foreign Ministry, the Bureau’s most important task, in the words of the Chinese Foreign Minister, was to ensure the protection of ‘our compatriot workers in France’ [wo gongjie lüfa tongbao].35

24In Chinese official discourse at this time, the World War One Chinese contract workers (as well as the Chinese workers contracted to work in the Transvaal gold mines earlier in the century) were referred to as huagong [overseas Chinese workers], in marked contrast to the term ‘coolies’ that was consistently used by British authorities to describe the Chinese workers (and indeed to the mid-nineteenth century Chinese official description of indentured labourers as ‘pigs’ or ‘swine’). In Anglophone discourse by the end of the nineteenth century the term ‘coolie’ – probably an Anglicisation of the Indian Tamil word kuli (literally meaning ‘wages’ or ‘waged labour’) and originally applied in the 1840s to indentured tea plantation workers in the Indian state of Assam – was specifically associated with cheap and menial indentured Asian labour (Indian and Chinese), racially connoting a lowly and inferior being, a ‘beast of burden’. In subsequent decades the term was applied to all overseas Chinese workers, even though indentured Chinese labour constituted only a relatively small proportion of all Chinese migrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

25Perhaps the most notable aspect of Chinese official discourse surrounding the World War One Chinese workers as far as foreign policy was concerned, however, was the direct link now made by the Chinese government between overseas Chinese workers and the national interest. For example, the Chinese Minister to France, Hu Weide, in 1916 envisioned Chinese workers arriving in France as the potential vanguard of future waves of Chinese migrants that would form the basis of a growing and valuable market for Chinese goods in Europe.36 More significantly, however, the Chinese government’s support for the allied recruitment was specifically intended to enhance China’s standing at a future peace conference, thereby gaining acceptance as an equal member of the international community and facilitating a significant revision of the unequal treaties that had been imposed on China by western imperial powers and Japan during the nineteenth century. This constituted, in effect, an unprecedented political use of overseas Chinese labour. Such an outlook intriguingly anticipated Maoist foreign policy as well as discourses in the current era of China’s ‘globalisation’. In the late 1960s, for example, the People’s Republic of China agreed to help finance and build (with the assistance of 15,000 Chinese workers and technicians) a railway linking Tanzania and Zambia; known as the TanZam or Uhuru (Freedom) Railway, it was completed in the mid-1970s. For Beijing, this dramatic gesture of international aid was meant to publicise China’s political commitment to the non-aligned world (and to Afro-Asian solidarity in particular).37 Just as in 1916-1918, therefore, the Chinese worker was to symbolise China’s active and positive interaction with the world. By the same token, contemporary discourses of Chinese labour export since the turn of the twenty-first century, as noted earlier, are infused with the political aim of highlighting China’s contribution to ‘civilisational’ development.38

26A second important aspect of the World War One recruitment of Chinese labour that has been overlooked in current Chinese official and academic discourses either valorising China’s contribution to the allied victory or emphasising the impact of World War One on China’s modern history, concerns the activities of the Chinese workers themselves during their sojourn in France. In many ways the story of Chinese workers in World War One France constitutes a significant chapter in modern China’s labour history. A focus on the lived experiences of the Chinese workers reveals that whatever essentialising stereotypes held of them by their British and French employers (e.g. Chinese ‘coolies’ were ‘docile’, ‘childlike’, ‘obedient’ and ‘hardworking’ if ‘handled properly’) they exercised considerable initiative in deciding what their interests were and in responding to, and protesting against, perceived breaches of their contracts, the dangerous nature of their work, and the harsh treatment they sometimes suffered.

27In terms of education, the Chinese workers organised spare-time classes for themselves; literacy in both Chinese and French was especially prized since it would enable them to avoid dependence on the more educated Chinese interpreters. They also created ‘self-governing associations’ [zizhihui] of their own, a kind of mutual help organisation that not only assisted needy members financially but also aimed to root out any ‘undesirable’ behaviour (drinking, fighting, gambling, visiting prostitutes) amongst their members that might incur a hostile reaction to their presence amongst local communities. Members were enjoined to keep a watchful eye over each other and were advised it was their patriotic duty to save and to study in their spare-time. Such self-policing amongst these Chinese workers – suggesting organisational skills and a growing sense of autonomy – actually foreshadowed similar initiatives taken by Chinese students in Beijing and Shanghai during the May Fourth protests of 1919 against the decisions of the Versailles Peace Conference that had brought little benefit to China (and later by students in the 1989 protest movement) to self-manage and discipline their organisations so as to pre-empt any hostile response on the part of domestic and foreign authorities. Significantly, Chinese workers in France at this time began to think of themselves as belonging to a wider constituency than simply their village, lineage or province; in so doing, they exhibited an embryonic national consciousness. During the first half of 1918, for example, hundreds of workers in a number of locations throughout France contributed a share of their wages for the relief of flood victims in northern China, while in October 1919 Chinese factory workers in Capdenac in southern France embroidered a flag commemorating ‘national day’ – 10 October, the date of the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution.

28More dramatically, Chinese workers were not inhibited from protesting against perceived injustice. Such protest took a variety of forms. In some cases they would resort to flight, such as those at a munitions plant in St.-Louis-de-Rhône (near Arles in Provence); when refused overtime pay in March 1918 they simply ‘downed tools’ and set off by foot for Marseille (where they had originally disembarked in France), but were quickly arrested by local police just outside town. Others such as the nearly two hundred in Caen went on strike in response to the reduction of bread rations in May 1918. At dockyards such as St. Nazaire on the northwestern coast, Chinese workers simply refused to unload coal because they considered such a task as dangerous and not part of their contract – much to the apoplectic fury of French dockyard managers who condemned them as ‘lazy troublemakers’ and demanded they be replaced by more ‘amenable’ colonial labour. In other cases, disputes could lead to violence; such incidents revealed that a growing sense of solidarity was beginning to take hold amongst the Chinese workers. When, in November 1916, a Chinese worker in Le Creusot was seriously wounded in a scuffle with a group of French workers infuriated when he had refused to help them pull a baggage cart, his compatriots from a nearby camp came out in force to avenge him. One of the French workers was beaten up while the others took refuge in a local café. The café was literally placed under siege by the angry Chinese workers until they were dispersed by local police. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the way in which Chinese workers defied authority occurred in September 1917, when five hundred of them in Firminy (Loire region) refused to work because of the dangers posed by continual German aerial bombardments. When the police were called in to preserve order they were met by a hail of bricks; although some police units that were armed began to fire in the air, the Chinese workers – according to an official report – were not intimidated in any way. Nothing illustrates so clearly the absurdity of the western stereotype of the passive and docile ‘coolie’.

29Although not discussed in contemporary Chinese academic discourse on World War One and its impact on modern China, an account of the experiences of the World War One Chinese workers deserves to be integrated with China’s domestic labour history of working-class organisations, strikes and protest, and an emerging class and national consciousness. It may be the case, however, that highlighting the activism of these workers and their propensity to protest against their working conditions and treatment disrupts the narrative of China’s constructive contribution to the allied cause. Another factor may be in play here. Since 2010, when strikes broke out in foreign-owned manufacturing enterprises such as Honda, the frequency of labour protest in China has become especially evident. Statistics collected by the China Labour Bulletin (CLB), for example, indicate that in 2011 an average of sixteen strikes per month occurred; this increased to thirty-two strikes per month in 2012. During the first four months of 2013 alone the CLB reports that fifty strikes per month took place.39 Given such an upsurge in labour demonstrations and strikes in recent years in China, it may be that the labour activism of the World War One Chinese workers is not a topic Chinese officials or academics are especially keen to highlight or explore.

Conclusion

30In conclusion, let us return to the parade of allied and Chinese troops in the grounds of the Forbidden City that took place in November 1918. During the course of the celebrations a band (probably from the American legation) played ‘Over There’, the American propaganda song composed by George Cohan in 1917 hailing the imminent arrival of US troops on the Western Front. In belligerent (‘Johnnie get your gun, get your gun, get your gun/Johnnie show the Hun you’re a son of a gun’) and militaristic (‘The Yanks are coming/The drums rum-tumming everywhere’) tones the song called on American manhood to ‘sort things out’ in Europe. There is a striking contrast with the song composed several months later by a member of the Chinese delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference (referred to earlier), which emphasised the non-violent and healing role the Chinese workers were destined to play in the war:

Since leaving our motherland
we have crossed seas and mountains.
Whether metal, stone, earth or wood we can work it,
the devastation of war we can repair.
We, the children of sacred China whose fate lies with Heaven
esteem the farmer and favour the artisan, but never resort to force.
Marching, marching, ever marching.
All within the four seas are brothers.
We are an army of workers devoting ourselves to labour
in order to build peace for you, humanity.

31There is no better example of the kind of vision Xi Jinping would like to project of a global Chinese presence benefitting the entire world.