The Chinese Labour Corps and the First World War

So wrote Gu Xingqing, a student who volunteered to work as a translator with the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) on the Western Front. The members of the CLC came to the First World War with a purpose. For China, their involvement was an important signal of the nation’s engagement with the war, and proof that it deserved a place in peace negotiations. Chinese intellectuals, at the same time, had long argued that travel and work abroad were crucial if the Chinese people were to broaden their outlook. For Ma Chunling, a teacher who joined the CLC, the decision to volunteer “not only allows me to gain new knowledge … it also fulfilled my wish to travel. An opportunity of a lifetime that I cannot pass!” For the Entente nations, the purpose was less lofty: they needed workers, skilled and unskilled. The enthusiasm of August 1914 had drawn into armies all sorts of men whose work experience was scarcely valued at the time. And when so many men were killed in the early battles, armies struggled to fill the gaps. More importantly, the vast increase in armies from 1915 onward, which eventually numbered millions of young men, led to additional shortages of labour. China turned out to be a valuable source of workers.

Liang Shiyi, a senior Chinese politician, made the first overture, suggesting to the British government in 1915 that a force of military labourers (with the emphasis on ‘military’ — they were to be armed) could be provided to support the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front. Despite the clear need, however, the British politely declined. France was more amenable, especially when the word ‘military’ was removed from the equation, and accepted China’s proposal in the summer of 1915. Britain, soon realizing that any offer of manpower was not to be sneezed at, followed suit in August 1916. By war’s end, Britain had engaged some 100,000 Chinese men, the French some 40,000. About 10,000 of the latter were temporarily loaned to the American Expeditionary Force.

The men were not enlisted as soldiers but hired under contract as labourers, both common and skilled. Liang established a private company, under government oversight, to act as a recruiting agent for France; the British preferred to rely on their own networks in China, particularly missionaries. Pay and work hours were better under the French than the British, and the French tended to employ labourers in the rear areas and in military industries rather than at the front. For example, almost every steam crane in a French Channel port was driven by a Chinese crane operator. The BEF, in contrast, used thousands of Chinese labourers close to the front lines, despite earlier pledges that they would not work under enemy fire.

If the work and wages were worse under the British, so, too, was the racism. In relative terms, the French showed greater tolerance and decency to Chinese labourers — so much so that thousands of them, having been integrated much more deeply into French society, opted to remain in France after the war, some marrying French women and starting their own families. The British (and the Americans) were less tolerant. Yet they gave fulsome praise to the Chinese as a group — “the introduction of Chinese labour was a great experiment … [that] has succeeded, the doubters have become enthusiasts, the work accomplished has already been enormous, disputes and misunderstandings have been marvellously rare,” enthused one British report. But there is little indication that the labourer from Shandong, filling sandbags behind Arras, felt so personally valued. Yan Yangchu, a student who founded the Chinese Laborers’ Weekly in Paris in 1919, recalled how Europeans looked down on the Chinese, sometimes referring to them derisively as “coolie corpses.”