Chinese labourers in France

The British chronology of the war records under 30 December 1916 that the governments of Britain and China concluded an agreement on the employment of Chinese labourers in France. Accounts disagree about the form and date of this arrangement. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the British put the plan to the Chinese government in October 1916, and some sources speak of an agreement concluded already then. China was at that time a neutral state and could not openly send its citizens to work for belligerent armies, so recruitment was at first conducted semi-officially, with the tacit consent of the authorities in Peking and of local officials.

A shortage of hands

In the autumn of 1916, after the losses on the Somme, the British were short of men for work behind the front. Almost every fit soldier was needed in the trenches, yet someone had to unload ships, build and repair roads, railways and airfields, and run the ports, warehouses and ammunition dumps. Indian labour units had been working in France since 1915, and contingents from South Africa, Egypt and the Caribbean were soon to join them. According to the British website The Long, Long Trail, General Douglas Haig asked for an additional 21,000 labourers.

The French were the first to turn to Chinese labourers. The idea of sending workers to Europe instead of soldiers had been put forward as early as 1915 by the Chinese politician Liang Shiyi. On 14 May 1916 in Peking a French military mission signed a contract with the Huimin company, which he controlled, for the supply of 50,000 labourers. The first group, numbering according to various sources from about 1,700 to almost 2,000 men, sailed from Tientsin in July and reached Marseille at the end of August. The Chinese employed by the French worked on civilian contracts, mainly in factories behind the front.

The Chinese Labour Corps

The British followed France’s example but opted for a military organisation. The Chinese Labour Corps was an unarmed formation, but it belonged to the British Army and was subject to military law. On 31 October 1916 Thomas J. Bourne, a railway engineer who had worked in China for nearly thirty years, arrived at Weihaiwei, a British leased territory on the Shantung peninsula, with orders to set up a recruiting centre there. Volunteers were sought through notices and through British missionaries. Those who came forward were above all poor peasants from the provinces of Shantung and Zhili. They signed a three-year contract. Besides pay far higher than at home they received food, clothing, accommodation and medical care, and their families in China received regular allowances. At the recruiting centres companies of 300–500 men were formed under British officers. The contracts forbade sending the labourers closer than about ten miles to the front line, but in practice this was not always observed.

The first ship, with 1,088 labourers, sailed from Weihaiwei on 18 January 1917. The journey to France took about three months. Most of the Chinese sailed across the Pacific to Vancouver, travelled by train across Canada to the Atlantic coast and from there by ship to England and France. The route through the Mediterranean was increasingly dangerous. In February 1917 a German submarine sank the French steamer Athos, carrying among others Chinese labourers, east of Malta. 754 people died.

At the end of 1917 about 54,000 Chinese were working for the British in France and Belgium, and at the armistice almost 96,000. According to various estimates, between 30,000 and 40,000 worked for the French. In May 1919 about 80,000 Chinese were still working for the British, now doing, among other things, the dangerous work of clearing the battlefields. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, nearly 2,000 labourers of the Chinese Labour Corps died during the war, many of them of Spanish flu. The largest cemetery of Chinese labourers was established at Nolette near Noyelles-sur-Mer in the Somme department.