2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. 100 years ago, 140,000 Chinese laborers were recruited by Britain and France and sent to the smoke-filled battlefield of the Western Front, about 80,000 of whom were from Shandong along the Jiaoji Railway. In the three years of "Lower Europe", nearly 20,000 Chinese workers were killed or their whereabouts are unknown. This tragic history forged by 140,000 Chinese workers with sweat and blood has not been known for many years, and their stories have been buried in the sand of history.
Although 100 years have passed, the remains and stories of Chinese workers can still be continuously found through the descendants of Chinese workers and those who know about them. Jointly sponsored by the United Front Work Department of the CPC Shandong Provincial CPC Committee, the Propaganda Department of the Provincial CPC Committee, and the Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, and undertaken by the Shandong Overseas Chinese Association and the Shandong Museum, the "Remembering History, Cherishing Peace -- Historical Materials and Photo Exhibitions of Chinese Workers in world war I" is being held at the Provincial Museum, which vividly and in detail presents the first scene of Chinese workers crossing the ocean through more than 300 photos, more than 100 pieces of Chinese workers' relics and precious original images, and reproduces the vivid individual life stories under the cover of tragedy and death.
In July 1914, the First World War broke out, Britain, France and other countries thought that they could go home for Christmas after a fight, but they did not expect the war to expand, becoming a war involving more than 1 billion people around the world, and the casualties in the history of war were tragic and protracted.
After two or three years of fighting, the Entente's Chinese, British, and French forces were sharply reduced, and the personnel of the rear military factories were transferred to the front line to participate in the war, and there was a serious shortage of manpower. In May 1916, China and France took the lead in signing a contract, which tried to avoid the words "participation in the war" and avoid attacks on the way of Chinese workers. The contract clearly stipulates the number of years of domestic helpers, working hours, wages and benefits, and medical expenses for death, injury and illness of Chinese workers.
In 1917, the British also set up a recruitment base in Weihai, its leased area, to recruit strong northerners. Since then, a second base has been opened in Qingdao, and four recruitment points have been set up along the Jiaoji Railway: Jinan, Zhoucun, Fangzi and Qingdao. To work in Europe, you can send clothes and food, your family members can get about 10 yuan of ocean "settlement fee" every month, Chinese workers have another salary in Europe, and a large number of farmers who have suffered from life leave home, leave the land, and come to the simple Chinese workers camps built in Britain and France to receive screening and training.
Britain and France recruited Chinese workers extremely harshly, and were screened according to their own recruitment conditions. Applicants were sent for medical examinations, including stripping naked, expelling lice, and shaving and cutting the hair of those with long pigtails. Trachoma was endemic at the time, and 60% of people were turned away.
Military doctors vaccinated the "Shandong Han" who was strong and physically strong against typhoid fever. Because 80% of the Chinese workers are illiterate, and even some of them do not have names, or arbitrarily name "Wang Da Nose", etc., the British and French Chinese workers decided to use bracelets and numbers as everyone's "passport". This copper bracelet cannot be removed at any time. In the days of waiting for the departure, the Chinese workers conducted gymnastics training under the guidance of the officers. Daryl Klein, who was working in the Chinese workers' camp at the time, wrote after visiting the Chinese workers' camp: "It was exactly like a prisoner-of-war camp or a military camp. These Chinese workers march in line every day, wearing uniform brown and yellow uniforms and dark brown hats for freehand training. ”
In February 1917, a cruise ship transporting Chinese workers was sunk by a German submarine in the Mediterranean, killing 543 Chinese workers, and the Chinese workers no longer traveled through the Strait of Malacca, most of them entered Europe through the American continent, and some detoured through the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. The first batch of Chinese workers arrived in Liverpool, England, in April 1917, and some died of unsatisfactory reasons as soon as they landed, and dozens of people were buried in the cemetery in Liverpool, and the names and places of origin of most of them could not be traced.
Among the Chinese workers who crossed the ocean, there was a special person, who was Sun Gan, a teacher in Zibo, Shandong, whose number was "63484". Unlike the vast majority of people who "earn foreign money", Sun Gan's family is not difficult, his father is a teacher, his brother is doing business outside the province, he graduated from the Jinan Provincial Normal School, he is a primary school teacher, and his motivation for crossing the ocean is extraordinary: to go to the West to investigate, to come back to "education to save the country".
Due to his thin body, after being rejected three times at the Zhoucun recruitment point, Sun Gan negotiated with the British and insisted on going, and finally got his wish. In July 1917, he and more than a thousand people boarded a ship in Qingdao and set off. The cabin was crowded, the corners and corners were crowded with people, and many people began to fear in their hearts. That night, Sun Gan wrote in his diary: "Once you are far away from Qingdao, there are no mountains, and the green waves and white flowers are far away. More than a thousand companions cheered and wished a happy and safe future. ”
However, the road has been extremely difficult. Sun Gan's recorded itinerary was: through Korea, across Japan, across the Pacific Ocean, to Vancouver, Canada, and then by train across the mainland, then by boat across the Atlantic Ocean to Britain, and then across the English Channel to the French battlefield. The whole journey lasted almost two months.
Seasickness, lack of diet, poor hygiene, coupled with extremely cold weather in Canada, led to the death of some Chinese workers from diseases. The dead were thrown into the sea without dignity, and "landing on the French mainland as ascending paradise" became the only belief of everyone.
Although the contract states that the Chinese workers will not participate in the war, most of the work of the Chinese workers is related to the war, and the work sites are mostly in dangerous areas. On the Western Front, some people grew grain on farms, logged in forests, some produced military supplies, transported combat ammunition, repaired railways and roads, and sent a large number of people to the front line of the battlefield to dig trenches and bury casualty bodies.
Most Chinese workers continued to shift with the war situation, and it was common to live in simple tents in the cold winter, and it was common to be unable to sleep at night and not have enough to eat. Many Chinese workers were killed by the explosion while cleaning up the battlefield squibs. In November 1917, German warplanes bombed a Chinese workers' camp in the Belgian city of Poplinger, and 13 Chinese workers were killed...
Because of the attention paid to physical fitness and skills in the Recruitment of Britain and France, there were a large number of carpenters, bricklayers, stonemasons, coppersmiths, silversmiths, shoemakers, railway workers, patrolmen and postmen among the Chinese workers. The British officer Fred Thayer told a story in which his Chinese workers were asked to lift a huge naval gun from the ground, which Thayer thought was very difficult, however, the Chinese worker "punched a wedge at one end as a support point, marked a beam at the balance point, and then lifted the other end, slowly but effortlessly, the naval gun was hoisted." Thayer was proud that the Chinese workers had "defeated" the engineers of the army.
A British military officer who worked with Chinese workers believed they were good at building engineering and manufacturing tools. According to the "Information on Chinese Workers", Chinese "hard-working, skillful, and if properly managed, they are the best workers in the world." After testing multiple types of work, the British issued skilled technician certificates to 4725 Chinese workers.
For Chinese workers, there are also negative comments. British officers who discriminated against Chinese workers accused them of being lazy, dirty, and incompetent, and some warned them of "respect and obedience." Sun Gan's "Record of Chinese Workers" also records some ugly incidents of gambling Chinese workers, and he advises his compatriots: "If you gamble and lose all your money, after returning home, your neighbors and nephews will also look down on you." ”
In the public information, it can be found that most Chinese workers are optimistic, frank and interesting. They use their leisure time to carry out a series of recreational activities. They read newspapers and periodicals and cared about current political affairs; they cleaned their simple dormitories spotlessly; they ate butter cakes and made noodles on the stove at the construction site; they didn't drink cold water, they boiled hot water to drink tea, "people who loved tea after work lined up one after another, boiling amber liquid and drinking them"; they practiced chess, flew kites, and sang operas, books, and sword skills in addition to heavy work, entertaining everyone... The New Year's Union celebrates the Chinese New Year in a traditional way, pasting Spring Festivals in barracks, laying flowers, praying to simple temples, juggling, dragon and lion dances.
The four-year-long World War I in November 1918 finally ended with the surrender of Germany. The British repatriated the first 365 sick Chinese workers on November 1, and the last arrived in Qingdao on September 13, 1920. About 3,000 Chinese workers remained in France because they married French women or received new employment contracts. After a long period of war and hardship, more than 20,000 of the 140,000 Chinese workers died or disappeared.
After disembarking from Qingdao, they did not receive the government's merits and medals, but were monitored by the military and police, and could not act casually; most of them returned to the countryside to work as farmers and disappeared into the vast sea of people, and thought that this was a tragic past of working for the Beiyang government and for foreigners, and they no longer made a name for themselves, and a few people used their savings and knowledge gained in Europe to run education, open clinics, and build factories.
At the beginning of 1920, Sun Gan, who returned to Boshan, brought back not only the hard work along the way, but also the broadened horizon. Sun Gan perfected his diary, and wrote "Records of Chinese Workers in European Wars" and "Records of The Battlefields of the World War" (published in 2013 as "Records of Chinese Workers") in more than 80,000 words, detailing the work and life of Chinese workers, the conflicts between Chinese workers and the British army, and many cultural conflicts, such as kissing ceremonies that stunned him. Sun Gan, who went to France with the idea of education to save the country, went to the countryside many times during his time in France to inspect the school, and what shocked him most was that there was a girls' school in France, and rural girls could receive civic education. Inspired by this, after returning to China, Sun Gan opened a free girls' primary school in Boshan, Zibo...
In recent years, this dusty history has gradually been unveiled, and the contributions of Chinese workers have gradually been recognized. As the hometown of 80,000 Chinese workers, Over the years, Shandong has continuously salvaged the pearls of Shi Hai related to Chinese workers through various channels, excavating and studying this almost obliterated history. As early as 2003, the Shandong overseas Chinese delegation went to France to participate in the World War I Chinese Workers' Memorial Service; in 2014, the Shandong Provincial Overseas Chinese Affairs Office went to the United Kingdom, Belgium and France to hold a photo exhibition of The Chinese Workers of the First World War; in September 2018, at the Peace Forum held by UNESCO, in the name of the Shandong Overseas Exchange Association, the bronze statue of the Chinese workers of the First World War was donated; in November 2018, the "Historical Materials and Pictures of chinese workers in the First World War" toured the United Kingdom, France and Belgium. At the historical node of the international community commemorating the centenary of the end of the First World War, the voice from the hometown of Chinese workers was issued, which received widespread attention from the media and the public at home and abroad.
Yang Weijian, deputy dean of the School of Letters at Shanghai University and director of the Center for Modern Humanities Studies, has been paying attention to and studying the ideological and cultural relationship between China and the First World War for many years. He said that the reason why China was involved in the First World War was because of the issue of Shandong's rights and interests, the imperialist war burned into our land, Jiaozhou Bay also became the battlefield of World War I (The Japanese-German War), and the injustice of the Paris Peace Conference in disposing of Shandong's rights and interests after the war directly led to the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement, and this outstanding case was finally resolved at the Washington Conference. Interestingly, the recovery of Shandong's rights and interests depends to a large extent on the contribution of Chinese laborers (the vast majority of whom are Shandong laborers), so that laborers transcend the dimension of immigrants or labor commodities in the general sense, have major national contributions and international contributions, they are not warriors, but have a more positive peaceful significance than fighters, and the so-called "labor sacred" (Cai Yuanpei) is proposed in this context.
"At the international level, in recent years, the issue of Chinese labor in World War I has received more and more attention and has become an international research hotspot. France, Belgium, the United Kingdom and other places have successively established Chinese labor memorial facilities in the First World War, and the commemoration of Chinese laborers has also become an important part in the public ceremonies of britain and France and other countries on the 100th anniversary of the victory of the First World War in 2018. Yang Weijian said that unfortunately, for most ordinary people and even many intellectual elites, the value and memory of Chinese labor in World War I is still a blank, and we must tell the story of Chinese labor today. Moreover, on the battlefields of Europe, Westerners have also re-recognized Chinese through labor, they are no longer the sick men of East Asia with pigtails, but healthy and happy Chinese, which has important civilizational historical significance. The study of the history of China's relationship with the First World War should not only focus on macro diplomacy, politics and the war itself, but also require in-depth ideological and cultural understanding, turning its attention to the faces of those living laborers, and telling the historical story of Chinese laborers in the First World War through a richer humanistic dimension.
Qilu Evening News Qilu one-point reporter Shi Wenjing
Description: Some of the materials in this article refer to the "Exhibition of Historical Materials and Pictures of Chinese Workers in World War I", Sun Gan's "Records of Chinese Workers", Xu Guoqi's "China and the Great War: Seeking New National Identity and Internationalization", "Expedition for Civilization: The Story of Chinese Workers on the Western Front During World War I", "Chinese Workers in World War I", and Chen Sanjing's "Chinese Workers and european wars". The pictures in this edition are provided by Shandong Overseas Chinese Association.
(One Point Number Humanities Qilu)