China Declares War and Sends the Chinese Labour Corps
China's republican government, established after the 1911 revolution, saw the war primarily as an opportunity: entering on the Allied side, even without sending combat troops, might earn China a seat at the eventual peace conference and a chance to reclaim the German concessions Japan had seized at Tsingtao in 1914. Instead of soldiers, China supplied labour -- roughly 140,000 men recruited mostly from Shandong and other northern provinces, organized into the Chinese Labour Corps and shipped to France and Belgium, where they dug trenches, built and repaired roads and railways, unloaded munitions, and even helped clear unexploded ordnance and rebury the dead after the armistice, all typically under harsh, segregated conditions and at real risk to their lives. China's wartime gamble failed. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Allied powers transferred Germany's former rights in Shandong to Japan rather than restoring them to China, despite China's Allied war contribution -- a decision that provoked the mass protests of the May Fourth Movement and left a lasting sense of betrayal by the Western powers among Chinese nationalists.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Military
