The Chinese forces history forgot
Nearly 150,000 men were shipped from China to help the Allies in 1916. Now, their story is finally being told, reveals Guy Kelly
At this time of year, as people pin crimson poppies to their lapels and prepare to recognise the extraordinary sacrifices made by our Armed Forces, the message is emphatic: we will remember them. Despite that collective resolution, however, there remain some contributions to Britain’s war efforts over the last century that have never received the attention they deserve. Many untold acts of heroism exist, but arguably none is greater in scale – or less heralded – than that of Chinese labourers in the First World War. This year, 100 years on from their deployment, it’s hoped that might finally change.
Speaking at the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), as it became known, in central London last month, Joanna Lumley, who is supporting a campaign to recognise their contribution to the British war effort, excused our ignorance.
“These are men scrubbed out of history, so it is not a surprise that people do not know the story,” she says. “The implications of China’s role were vast, and we must study it.”
By 1916, the British Army had swollen considerably. Forces once of a few hundred thousand men had increased to around a million, and the labour supply tasked with keeping that Army going – repairing vehicles, building roads, transporting ammunition – grew thin. Catastrophic losses in the bloody Battle of the Somme later that year saw all those labourers called to the front line. Finding themselves equally desperate for non-combat manpower, the British and French landed on an unlikely source.
The government of China, which was at that point resolutely neutral during the war, offered to send men to help the Allies. Yet it wasn’t until late 1916 that a deal was struck to ship tens of thousands over to France.
The CLC consisted of mainly poor and uneducated men from all over China, though the majority came from the north-eastern Shandong province, where people were considered larger and better suited to European winters. Their journey was perilous: a gruelling three-month passage across the Pacific, secretly crossing Canada by train (blacked-out carriages avoided taxes and kept the media from reporting their movements) and on to ships over the Atlantic, where they eventually joined up with their commanding British and French officers and got to work.
One of these boats was sunk by a German torpedo in August 1917, forcing China to break its neutrality and declare war on Germany. Undeterred, boat after boat continued to make the journey, until the CLC reportedly consisted of around 140,000 men – far more than the labour corps from any other nation. In their contracts, hastily drawn up, the Allies agreed the recruits would be employed for three years, be kept a number of miles from the front line and receive a small wage. All three of those terms were pushed, at best.
“At that time, war would have meant nothing to these men. There was a threat from the Japanese – but they wouldn’t have understood what they were going into,” says Karen Soo, who explores the role her grandfather, Soo Yuan Yi, played in the group in a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Forgotten Army, to be shown on Remembrance Sunday.
Soo Yuan Yi joined up on his own at the age of 20, in the hope of sending money back to his parents. “When they signed the contracts, it was supposed to be ‘factory and agricultural work’. The reality was much different.” The CLC’S tasks, conducted 10 hours a day, seven days a week, aside from three holiday days, also included digging trenches, burying the dead, filling in bomb craters and staying long after Armistice Day to turn battle-scarred land back into farmable fields. It was exhausting and deadly; the Chinese lost an estimated 3,000 in France.
“Imagine it,” says Soo, 42, “you arrive on a battlefield not knowing what’s going on, and an officer tells you: ‘See that bomb over there?’ Whenever that happens, you rush over and fill the hole up. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Lumley, whose support for the group follows her successful campaign to improve the rights of the Gurkhas in 2008, believes a large part the CLC’S unheralded status lies in the nature of the work they were doing.
“They were given the absolute dogsbody tasks. You think of the people wounded, people coming home and recovering, but how often do you think of what was left? Who clears up after these great slaughters?” she said.
The plaque at the China Institute in Bloomsbury is the first memorial to namecheck the CLC’S role in the war. Plans for a more prominent monument elsewhere in London are afoot. At the moment, of the roughly 60,000 war memorials around the UK, none mentions China.
Referred to as the “forgotten of the Forgotten”, the CLC’S slow erasure from the history books began just as the war ended. After the Allies broke a promise to return Shandong province (by then under Japanese control) in return for their support, China refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles as a mark of what it saw as betrayal. Medals given by the British to war veterans were of a lower quality for the CLC than everybody else. And perhaps most crushingly, when space was needed on the Panthéon de la Guerre – a 40ft-high painting begun in France in 1914 and showing its international war allies, to include the late arrival of the US in 1917 – the Chinese were literally painted over.
“It’s a shameful episode,” Lumley says, “and it shows a lot about how we look at war. Curriculums are never going to bother with people who weren’t soldiers.”
After completing his service, Soo’s grandfather made a home in Liverpool. Like many, he rarely spoke of his war experience, and in the absence of public recognition, his story – as well as those of his fellow CLC members – remained hidden until only recently.
“We focus on the fighters and fliers, but the First World War was a team effort,” says Soo. “Who knows what might have happened without them.”
Britain’s Forgotten Army is on Channel 4 next Sunday at 7pm