Chinese workers on the western front

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/19/chinese-workers-western-front

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I have to thank you for publishing the story about the forgotten men of the Chinese Labour Corps (Painted out of history, Britain’s Chinese allies, 15 August). My grandfather served with them in France and was invalided back to the UK after being gassed. He recovered enough to start a Chinese provision shop importing goods from Hong Kong by West India Dock. He prospered, and was able to bring his son, my father, from China to learn and take over the business before returning home to later die.

My father prospered too. He did good business serving the Chinese crews from the ships coming from the far east, and was able to bring my mother from China in 1927. I was born in 1929, and we were not able to return to China later due to war – first the Japanese and then the Germans. After the war, my father died and the People’s Republic of China confiscated all our property back at the village, and so we are now settled here, with four generations in the UK. I believe that we are a unique family.William WongLondon

• Your account understated how horrendously these 95,000 Chinese were treated, as were 40,000 under French control. As Xu Guoqi revealed in his book Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War, members of the Chinese Labour Corps who survived the journey from China were in effect held as forced labour – mostly used for trench digging, and so exposed to direct enemy fire. When not working, they were held in barbed-wire compounds, frequently beaten, and addressed not by name but by a “coolie number”.

After the war, the 80,000 or so CLC personnel still alive were engaged in mine clearance – often fatal. In 1919 CLC survivors, ordered to leave Belgium, were interned in France. Some were killed when groups of British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander troops threw grenades into CLC camps; others are said to have been shot to avoid repatriation costs. All this is a reminder of how dehumanising and brutalising violent conflict is for all drawn into it.Bruce Ross-SmithOxford