China Declares War and Sends the Chinese Labour Corps
China declared war on Germany in August 1917 without sending a soldier to fight and lost the peace anyway. The government in Beijing had no quarrel with Berlin. What it wanted was a seat at the eventual peace conference and the recovery of the German concession at Qingdao in Shandong, which Japan had taken in 1914 and refused to return. Japan had followed that with the Twenty-One Demands in 1915, which would have made China a protectorate in substance, and China had conceded most of them under an ultimatum. The declaration of war was pushed by Liang Qichao and opposed by the premier, and the argument brought down two governments and produced a brief attempt to restore the Qing emperor in July 1917 that lasted twelve days. China's contribution was labour. Some 140,000 men of the Chinese Labour Corps were recruited, mostly from Shandong, and shipped to France and Belgium to dig trenches, unload ships, repair tanks and clear battlefields, and around 2,000 died; the last of them left Europe in 1920. At Versailles the Chinese delegation asked for Shandong and was refused, because Britain and France had made secret undertakings to Japan in 1917 and Japan had ships in the war. The news reached Beijing on 4 May 1919 and produced student demonstrations, a national boycott and a movement that turned a generation against both the warlord government and the Western powers. China refused to sign the treaty, the only country present to do so. The May Fourth Movement is where modern Chinese politics begins. Both the Nationalists and the Communists, founded two years later, came out of it, and the lesson drawn by a generation of students was that appeals to Western principle would be answered with Western interests.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Military
