armistice day
I'm a day late, because life has an annoying habit of happening. But it's ok, because my timezone means it's still Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day, or whatever other name 11 November may go by, in many parts of the world.
11 November is also Singles' Day. Apparently in the 1990s some lonely students in Nanjing noticed all those ones in a row and decided to hold a celebration of their single-hood, or something like that. I honestly can't be bothered looking that up because Singles' Day has always annoyed me.
Now, to be clear, I don't mind new traditions. New traditions spring up all the time. That's how traditions are formed. What I mind is the date, and the forgetting that occupying this date implies.
It doesn't seem to be commonly known, or it seems to be commonly forgotten, even in China, that China was involved in World War One.
First up was the Japanese attack on the German concession in Qingdao in 19141. This was the only battle of World War One fought in East Asia. Sure, China was largely a bystander, hosting a battle on its soil, but soil it had been forced to concede to Germany, and which Japan promptly took over.
Second was the Chinese Labour Corps. Obviously, given their name, the Chinese Labour Corps performed a lot of the logistical and engineering jobs that keep an army working so that soldiers can fight. Most of those who died in France died from disease, but they were close enough to or even on the frontlines that some were killed in combat, and some won medals for their bravery.
In the opening paragraphs of Part II: Shanghai Days of his autobiography2, Rewi Alley describes how Chinese people were treated in North Canterbury during his childhood. There is nothing in there for New Zealanders to be proud of - and honestly, I'm not sure much has changed. Well, there's no more poll tax or laws restricting immigration targeted specifically at Chinese, but a lot of the old attitudes persist. Anyways, the next section, entitled Off to Shanghai, starts thusly:
My first real human contact with northern Chinese was outside New Zealand during World War 1. It was the first time I had any inkling of what China meant.
He specifies northern Chinese because most of the Chinese immigration to New Zealand prior to the 1980s was from Guangdong Province, and so almost all of the Chinese he had seen in New Zealand in his youth were descendants of those migrants from Guangdong. They tended to be short and lightly built.
He continues:
Down on the Somme in 1918 at the time of the big retreat, as we advanced our position we saw an encampment of Chinese Labour Corps being mustered to go to front-line duty. The Corps was in the main composed of Shandong farmers who were drafted and sent off from the Shandong ports. The first time I met up with them was outside a base camp at Etaples. I was with a friend, out for adventure one evening, just two New Zealand common infantrymen in their late teens. We met two tall men, dressed in blue and with fur hats. They smiled, we smiled, and we went together into a wine shop and had crusty French bread and red wine, talking in snatches of broken French. Then came a struggle as both sides insisted on paying. They were the first Chinese in our lives that we had been able to meet on the level ground of mutual respect. Some days later we passed a whole battalion of them on the march, and someone said, "Chinese Labour Corps" I found it hard to believe, as the Chinese I had known in New Zealand were short and slight in build. But some amongst these men were six foot giants.
I find Alley's progression fascinating, how he frankly and openly describes the racism that was prevalent in the New Zealand of his youth, and how he describes meeting Chinese Labour Corpsmen in France in wartime as meeting Chinese people on the level ground of mutual respect for the first time in his life. I wonder how much of this was simply young men being far from home on a big adventure - I've seen plenty of that in my younger days. But I also wonder how much of that was the experience of being at war. Sure, certain capitalists were having a grand time enriching themselves selling weapons to the belligerents, but nobody else was enjoying the war, and the men at the front line (and many women not far behind the front line), regardless of skin colour, nationality, ethnicity, social class, religion, or any of those other bullshit distinctions, were all facing the exact same prospect of horrific, violent death and dismemberment on the daily. I wonder how much that contributed to meeting people from distant lands as equals?
And the comment on six foot giants? First, remember that average heights were a lot shorter back then. Food security and modern medicine work wonders for people achieving the full heights their DNA allows. Then, remember that most Chinese Alley had seen up to that point were the descendants of migrants from Guangdong, and that the Chinese Labour Corps was very much dominated by recruits from Shandong. Even today, Shandong has a reputation for producing unusually tall people.
The next paragraph has a particularly fascinating anecdote, given that the Chinese Labour Corps was there to provide labour, and was not supposed to be involved in combat. Alley describes how in March 1918 his unit was sent from the Ypres Salient to help stop a German advance, how their defensive lines were stretched thin and were poorly supported, and how there was a gap in the line. How to fill that gap? Alley reports:
A Chinese Labour Corps battalion at the rear was hastily armed and sent to hold it. Through the offensives of late March and early April they held their piece well. To my knowledge no official history has ever mentioned this nor have I ever seen it in any news report.
It may not be obvious to those unfamiliar with the old school New Zealand vernacular Alley writes in, but Alley demonstrates here an immense amount of respect for the men of the Chinese Labour Corps.
China did formally enter the war on 14 August 1917 (only four months and a few days after the USA), and so had a seat at the Paris Peace Conference. At the conference, China attempted to have the former German Concession at Qingdao returned to its sovereignty. The conference decided to award Qingdao to Japan. When news of this reached Beijing the students of Peking University immediately put their books down and marched out on the streets in protest -and so the May Fourth Movement began.
China's participation in World War One may have been relatively "minor", but its participation in the war had a large, although largely forgotten, effect on China's modern history. And in any case, the sacrifice and courage of the roughly 140,000 men of the Chinese Labour Corps deserves to be remembered.