The Chinese Labour Corps

An interview with Peter Johnson

While British Columbia regiments were reluctant to enlist Chinese soldiers, the British War Office was more than happy to transport labourers directly from China to the Western Front to help in the war effort. Peter Johnson is the author of Quarantined: Life and Death at William Head Station, 1872–1959. He has researched the use of Chinese labourers for the war effort, and their quarantine at William Head near Victoria.

Mark Forsythe: What role does William Head play in this story?

Peter Johnson: The site of the William Head Penitentiary, out on William Head Peninsula, was a quarantine station, but it closed in 1959. The World Health Organization said, “Right, the fight of infectious diseases is over.” Besides we needed the place for prisoners.

Mark: Was it also used as a tool for exclusion?

Peter: No question. The politics of privilege and the economics of indifference kept Ottawa from taking on its responsibility. Part of the contract of joining Confederation was that the federal government would provide British Columbia with quarantine services. Well, it never did. In 1871 when BC joined Canada there wasn’t even a federal quarantine office here. It took almost another twenty years for Ottawa to get its act together—they were shamed into it by a little white girl who died without access to any kind of station whatsoever. Certainly the politics of indifference played a role and also the history of racial prejudice. The Chinese were clobbered with a head tax, and in 1903 it doubled to five hundred dollars. Often quarantine legislation was used to support policies of deportation or policies of racism. That’s a common theme that runs throughout the book.

Mark: As you traced the history of quarantine in BC, you also tell us about the Chinese Labour Corps. Who were these people and what was their role in World War I?

Peter: It’s such a sad episode. It was mutually beneficial for China to send labourers to the European theatre of war and for Britain, who needed these labourers. There had been precedents for organized movement of indentured Chinese labourers all throughout the nineteenth century. The California gold rush needed Chinese miners; the CPR hired indentured Chinese labourers; the Boer War required them; the war in the Balkans needed Chinese labourers.

China was beginning to be overrun by foreign influences; the British were there, the French were there, the Russians and Germans were in China, as were the Japanese. At the turn of the twentieth century the Boxer Rebellion wanted all of these foreigners out. The Germans had occupied part of the northern province of China called Shandong and the Chinese also wanted them out. But the Japanese invaded Shandong and decided it would be a good jumping-off spot for their attack on Manchuria. Russia was involved in Inner Mongolia.

So there were reasons China wanted to ship out labourers. The new Chinese government believed if they were chucked out and they helped Europe with their war, then perhaps Europe would help rid them of the Japanese. Of course, it never happened.

And, of course, in Europe, there was the horror of the Somme in 1915, with fifty thousand dead the first day, half a million dead in six months. There were German submarine bases along the Belgian frontier that were destroying a million tons of British ships every month. All those working for the Allies along the front lines were required as regular members of the army, so they needed some kind of reinforcement corps.

Mark: What were the jobs of the Chinese Labour Corps?

Peter: They did everything from repairing tanks to working in steel and chemical plants, loading and unloading ships at port, shoring up the trenches, building huts, sandbagging, railway lines, the Chinese Labour Corps—ninety-six thousand of them we believe—really enabled the front lines to keep going. It took a year to organize and the Brits didn’t tell the Chinese what they were doing because China was neutral. China didn’t enter World War I until August of 1917, so all of this is happening two years before that.

The Chinese labour corps were technically a non-combatant force, but saw plenty of action in their work near the front. From The Graphic Magazine, Mar. 16, 1918

Mark: They were put into extremely dangerous situations, weren’t they?

Peter: It was actually horrific. They landed at Dunkirk and were fired upon. They were gassed as they moved along the line from the Somme to Ypres and were involved in whatever front-line attacks were going on. They were a non-combatant force. They were called the Chinese Labour Corps, and that was Churchill’s idea. He believed that if he recruited men in the regular army from the hinterlands of the Chinese Mongolian frontier that would break Chinese neutrality. So let’s pretend they are a volunteer force and call them a labour corps.

Mark: The cover story was that they were just providing a service?

Peter: Providing a service, and we paid them thirty cents a day, whereas a regular soldier would make $1.30 a day. I have to hand it to the British War office as they really organized this fast movement. Think of it, little Chinese villages on the northern frontier. They wouldn’t be interested in fighting in Europe. Europe was a war-mad continent as far as the Chinese peasants were concerned, but somehow they would recruit thousands of Chinese peasants, many of them illiterate.

Mark: When they arrived on BC shores, some were quarantined, and essentially quarantined again as they travelled across the country in sealed railway cars?

Peter: That’s how the prime minister waived the head tax. If we keep them in sealed trains there won’t have to be a head tax. The other reason was not to let the Chinese community across the country know what they were doing, because the Chinese communities, still embittered by the CPR not living up to the agreement of paying them properly after the building of the railway, would notify the Chinese Labour Corps on the trains and get them the hell out. And take them to North Battleford, Saskatchewan—or wherever else across the country that had labourers who worked on the CPR. They were also afraid that the Germans might catch on to this.

And so they came by ship. Fifty to sixty days from China. Another ten days waiting in a sealed part of William Head Quarantine Station. But there were too many of them. A quarantine station was constructed to handle a thousand people and many of those would be in tents. Suddenly by August of 1917 there were thirty thousand Chinese labourers at William Head. It was a horror story. They filed out into the community of Metchosin and stole doors and fence posts to lie on, to keep out of the rain, and raided the gardens for food. There were food riots.

Mark: How many of these labourers transited through Canada and came back?

Peter: Numbers vary. I would say a minimum of eighty-four thousand went across Canada; probably forty thousand of those came back to William Head, and they got rid of them as fast as they could. I think the official position was “Let’s get this over as fast as we can.” It became a terrible footnote to the enormity and pity of World War I.

The final resting place for members of the Chinese Labour Corps—Sain-en-Gohelle near Lens on the Western Front. Courtesy of Mark Forsythe

Mark: It’s important to acknowledge this now.

Peter: Especially for the Chinese community in BC and Canada. They for the longest time suffered the brunt of racist policies both in the administration of quarantine and in general racist policies. The Chinese community wants the rest of Canada to know that many Chinese labourers worked on behalf of the Allies, and supported what was a horrific losing battle on the Western Front. And they are as much Canadians by virtue of that and other acts in Canada as any other immigrant group. So it’s in a way an attempt to manifest some sort of great levelling. We are you. You are us. We are all the same. I think immigration history is about that. And it’s very interesting because of the Komagata Maru incident in Vancouver in 1914. The Indians are holding a memorial to that. So it’s really important that immigrant races tell their story. We’re all immigrants.

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