Betrayed Ally by Arnander Christopher; Wood Frances;

Author:Arnander, Christopher; Wood, Frances;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War I
ISBN: 4748328
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Aftermath

Most of the Chinese workers who travelled to France were semi- or completely illiterate. Even if a few learnt Cai Yuanpei’s 600 characters, very few were able to write home or compose any written record of their experience. Apart from a few accounts taken down by YMCA workers, little or nothing is known about their lives and very few were able to write home. Returning labourers went back to their villages and their village life between 1918 and 1920, carrying little of Europe with them, and although many had saved enough to buy land, it was reported that 3,001 were penniless when they returned to China. There were no victory parades for them, and even today there is little recognition of either their contribution or their sacrifice in China or elsewhere.

Of the 140,000 labourers sent to France, up to 10,000 died, their sacrifice dismissed by Lloyd George and Balfour. An element of the dismissal was the view that they were simply part of the widespread use of Chinese ‘coolie’ labour on railways and in mines throughout the world. They had been recruited ‘privately’ (because, despite the desperate need for their help, the recruiting system had to be invented to uphold China’s neutrality) and therefore, could be dismissed as non-combatants. The stigma of ‘coolie’ labour may be one reason that they have not yet been accorded much recognition in China today, although it is apparent that younger Chinese, especially those who study abroad in Belgium where the In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, commemorates the CLC, are beginning to make annual pilgrimages to the cemeteries at the Qingming festival (fifteen days after the Spring equinox, 4/5 April each year). Qingming is a Chinese national holiday when people go to family graves, tidy them and make offerings of incense, paper money and food to feed the ancestral spirits. Moved by these graves of Chinese who died far from home, with no relatives nearby, the students take offerings of tangerines and wine to each grave.

Those who died in Western Europe, from bombs, injuries or sickness, are buried in forty neatly tended war cemeteries established and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The largest, at Noyelles-sur-Mer, has a Chinese style stone gateway and 838 graves, each with an inscription and the name of the deceased in Chinese, made possible by the complex record-keeping of the recruiting officers.

There is evidence of an unpleasantly black sense of humour in the selection of epitaphs engraved on some tombstones. The inscription on the grave of Wang Enrong who was executed on 26 June 1918 for murdering a French woman, reads ‘Faithful Unto Death’, that of Hui Yuhe in the cemetery of Saint-Étienne au Mont who was executed on 12 September 1918 for murdering a fellow Chinese, reads, ‘Though Dead He Still Liveth’ and Zhang Ruzhi, executed in February 1920, who murdered a French prostitute and her three children, is remembered with the phrase, ‘A Good Reputation Endureth Forever’.40

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