Labor Diplomacy on the Western Front: China, the Chinese Labor Corps, and the Global Politics of World War I

Abstract

This paper examines the Chinese Labor Corps (CLC) during World War I as a critical but often overlooked dimension of both Chinese and global wartime history. Drawing on British, French, and Chinese sources alongside recent scholarship, it argues that China’s deployment of more than 140,000 laborers to the Western Front constituted a deliberate strategy of “labor diplomacy,” through which the Beiyang government sought international recognition without committing combat troops. While Chinese laborers performed indispensable work under hazardous conditions and within racialized hierarchies, their formally non‑colonial status placed them in an ambiguous position within imperial labor systems. Comparison with Indian and African labor forces reveals how this ambiguity exposed deeper contradictions within the Allied wartime order.

The paper further shows that the failure of this labor‑for‑recognition strategy at the Paris Peace Conference contributed to rising nationalist disillusionment in China and helped shape the May Fourth Movement. By integrating labor history and diplomacy, this study reframes the Chinese Labor Corps not as a marginal footnote, but as a revealing case that challenges battlefield‑centered narratives of World War I and highlights the global, racialized foundations of modern warfare.