Trade with China (3) Slave Labour and War

The Convention of Peking was part of the settlement of the Opium Wars.

The Convention permitted British ships to carry indentured Chinese workers to the Americas. The demand for Chinese workers in plantation economies and for railway construction rose sharply with the limitation and ultimate abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. To many contemporary observers, the ensuing “coolie trade” had many commonalities with the earlier slave trade—including brutal patterns of recruitment, frequent cases of kidnapping, inhuman conditions of transport, and high rates of laborers performing the work. In fact, the two practices were at times hard to differentiate. (101

Many Chinese were brought to America as coolies, but they were little better than slaves.

Chinese labour was used again during World War 1.

Even though China was still, in theory, a neutral country. The British and French governments, to make up for labour shortages in France, as well as to release British dockworkers in French ports military duty, employed over 140,000 Chinese contract workers between 1916 and 1918. During their sojourn in France, these Chinese workers were employed in a wide variety of war-related jobs, both behind the lines (in transportation, armaments and munitions production, machinery maintenance, and aerodrome construction) and at the front (making road repairs, digging trenches, and burying war dead). In evening schools set up by Chinese students in France, the workers were taught to read and write. When they returned to China after the war, they became an important driving force for social and political change. In the French factories, in particular, they had also become committed labor activists and acquired the skills and techniques of political mobilisation. (233)

Despite the contribution to the war effort made by the Chinese workers, the Western leaders who met at Versailles decided to give the eastern portion of Shandong province, which had formerly been controlled by Germany (German Kiaochow) to Japan rather than return it to China. This injustice has not been forgotten.