Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

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Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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Copyright © Frances Wood and Christopher Arnander, 2016

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Image Credits

Introduction

1.Japan sees an opportunity

2.New China, the ‘infant republic’

3.Japan: not playing straight

4.China in wartime, 1914–1916

5.The Chinese Labour Corps: Yellow ’eathens are ’elping out in France

Photo Gallery

6.Spies and Suspicions

7.A crucial year of chaos and decisions: 1917

8.After the war, the disappointment

9.Anatomy of a Betrayal: the interpreter’s account

10.China’s reaction

Appendix 1: Chronology of Recent Chinese History

Appendix 2: Key Personalities in the War

Notes

Acknowledgements

We came to writing this book from different directions. Frances, author of 12 books about Chinese matters, wrote an account of the chaotic diplomacy of China in the Great War, Picnics Prohibited, which was published by Penguin (Australia) in 2014. Christopher’s book about his grandfather, Private Lord Crawford’s Great War Diaries (Pen & Sword, 2013), referred to the Japanese and British seizure of the German enclave in Shandong in the first weeks of the war. We had already cooperated on Pavilions in the Air (Stacey International, 2008), a collection of Chinese and English proverbs, with cartoons.

It seemed to us that there was room for an accessible history of China and the Great War, with plenty of illustrations, aimed at the general reader. There is, in fact, a wealth of published material about the subject, but mostly it is geared to the academic world. For example, two very fine works by Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War (Cambridge, 2005) and Strangers on the Western Front (Harvard, 2011) were published by university presses. Li Ma’s Les travailleurs chinois en France dans la Première guerre mondiale (2012), about all aspects of the Chinese labourers’ experiences, was the fruit of a scholary colloquium in 2010. These volumes are to be recommended to any of our readers who might want to delve more deeply into the subject.

Before embarking on our book, we sounded out friends and acquaintances, most of whom had only the vaguest idea of China’s role in the Great War. Virtually all of them expressed great interest and curiosity. We were also encouraged by Julia Boyd, whose book Dance with the Dragon describes the expatriate community in China at the time. Dominiek Dendooven of the In Flanders Museum, Ypres, curated a marvellous exhibition in 2010 about the Chinese labourers in the war; we are grateful to him for his enthusiastic provision of information, images and advice. Nelson Oliver was a mine of information about the Chinese journeys across the Pacific and through Canada.

Libraries and other institutions that we found particularly helpful were the British Library, SOAS, The Library of Congress, Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, The National World War 1 Museum in Kansas City and UK National Archives at Kew.

We are grateful to.several descendants of diplomats who served in China during the Great War; they shared memories, illustrations and private papers with us. The archivists of three banks (Deutsche, HSBC and Barclays) provided useful information and images, for which acknowledgement is made at the appropriate place. We are indebted also to Professor Robert Bickers and Jamie Carstairs, of Historical Photographs of China/Visualising China.

We are especially grateful to our publisher, Pen & Sword; not only did they take on a title which is somewhat outside their military speciality, but they also coped marvellously with our detailed requirements. The task was made the more difficult because, while writing the book, we received many suggestions which justified some changes – the bane of any publisher. Their help has been unstinting, creative and good natured throughout the preparation of our book.

Image Credits

Plates

Taylor Archive, Barnsley, pp. 17–18, 31, 33–4, 37; Wellcome Library, London, p. 12; Tank Museum, Bovington, p. 38; Le Petit Journal, 6 April 1902, p. 14; Vroon BV, Breskens, p. 26;

W.R. Wheeler, China & the World War, 1918, pp. 28, 40–1; Mark Levitch, Panthéon de la Guerre, 2006, p. 52; Jeremy Rowett Johns and the Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol, pp. 29–30; The Australian War Memorial, Canberra, p. 39; L’Illustration, 1919, p. 47;

Sophia McKenna Lloyd, p. 55; Sint-Andries Abbey in Zevenkerken, Bruges, pp. 42–3; In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, p. 20; James Brazier, pp. 35–6; Tom Cohen, p. 45; Maberley Phillips, A History of Banks, Bankers & Banking in Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire, 1894 (courtesy of Barclays Bank Archives), p. 44; John Swire & Sons Ltd Archive at School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), London, p. 8. Other plates from the internet.

Text inserts

Library of Congress, Washington, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, pp. 46, 50, 68 (top), p. 82 (top), p. 130 (top & right), p. 152 (middle); Le Petit Journal, 3 March 1912, p. 78; Punch, 6 November 1918, p. 90; Taylor Archive, Barnsley, p. 86 (bottom), p. 92 (top left and top right); Honourable Artillery Company, London, Sylvester Alexander Album, p. 92 (bottom left); Historical Institute of Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt am Main, p. 54 (top & bottom); Alan Blaikley, p. 92 (bottom right), drawing by Ernest Blaikley; In Flanders Museum, Ypres, p. 92 (middle left), from The Message from Mars, Canadian army magazine; Barclays Bank Archives, p. 108 (top right), P.W. Matthews and A.W. Tuke, History of Barclays Bank Limited, 1926; University of Leeds, Special Collections, p. 90 (Major Purdon’s phrase book); Municipal Archives, Weihai, p. 90 (bottom right). Other illustrations credited on the page or taken from the internet.

Introduction

‘I had no idea’, or ‘Didn’t they help with tanks and roads?’ These are the sorts of responses made by otherwise well-informed friends to the question of how much they know about China in the First World War. The question provokes confessions of ignorance and surprise and few in the English-speaking world have any idea of China’s participation. China was so far away from the Somme that it seems irrelevant. Yet one of the first battles of the First World War was fought on Chinese soil. How many know that China joined the Entente Allies in 1917, in the same year as America? How many know that almost 140,000 Chinese served in France, as labourers, doing essential maintenance work on roads, trenches, railways and tanks and making up for the drastic manpower shortage by working in French factories and fields?

At least 5,000, perhaps as many as 10,000 lost their lives, some at sea, most buried thousands of miles from their homes and honoured in war cemeteries in France and Belgium. A further 200,000 served in Russia, of whom many were caught up in the Russian Revolution, and whose fate is mostly unknown. At the end of the war, a Chinese delegation attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 but China, no less than several other nations, felt utterly belittled and betrayed by its treatment at Versailles and did not sign the Peace Treaty.

The ensuing bitterness and riots, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, was a turning point in Chinese history. The Great War and its aftermath led directly, though slowly, to its current great power status. On the way, the Chinese people suffered the horrors of warlordism, Japanese invasion, famine, floods, world war, civil war and a reunified nation’s growing pains after Mao Zedong proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949.

These events still form the background to China’s sense of its place in the world. The events of 1914–1919 were of momentous significance to China in its development as a major power. At the beginning of the war, after thousands of years of imperial rule, China had been a republic for less than three years, when its territory in Shandong, formerly leased to Germany, was invaded by Japanese armed forces aided by a small British contingent. Secondly, thousands of Chinese men travelled half way across the world to work in dangerous conditions near the Western Front. And then, despite her contributions to the war, China felt humiliated and betrayed at Versailles. Chinese territory, occupied by Germany in 1897, was handed straight to Japan as a result of ‘secret agreements’ made by Lloyd George and the other Allies during the war, by which Chinese territory was promised to the Japanese when Europe experienced a temporary (though desperate) need for more ships and armaments from Japan.

The secret agreements all came out at Versailles in April 1919. President Wilson himself, architect of the Fourteen Points that he proposed as the basis of peace, was sympathetic to China’s cause. But he felt unable to resist the pressures of Japan and his European allies, so he agreed to abandon his policy of no secret agreements or treaties. He regretted this but it was important for him to set up his cherished scheme for a League of Nations which stood no chance if Japan opposed it. The irony is that it was killed by the US Senate in November 1919, the president having suffered a collapse of his health and with his political enemies refusing to compromise.

Japan’s activities in China during the war and her eventual triumph at Versailles led inexorably to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the full invasion of China in 1937. The vicious war that ensued was characterised by terrible savagery on both sides, most notoriously when the citizens of the then capital suffered the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 and the dykes of the Yellow River were deliberately broken in 1938 on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders in an attempt to stem the Japanese invasion. The barbarity of the war with Japan is seen by some as having contributed to the eventual triumph of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, since the Communists’ guerrilla tactics and consistent resistance to Japan inspired the broken nation.

China today is acknowledged as one of the world’s great powers and her economic dominance is watched with awe. Yet China’s recent history remains a major factor in her relations with the rest of the world. Though the iniquities of the nineteenth century Opium Wars are fairly well known, the almost unknown sacrifice of Chinese lives, and the humiliation at Versailles, together with the growing threat from Japan during the First World War and after, still inform the Chinese view of her place in the world and influence current relationships and attitudes.

The details of China’s role in the Great War are not well known in China itself, or elsewhere. Several academic books on the subject have appeared within the last decade but our aim is to provide a simple introduction for the general reader to a fascinating subject.

Transliteration

Chinese place names and personal names have been transliterated by Europeans in a variety of ways since the seventeenth century. The French and the Germans had their own romanisation or transliteration systems, and during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most English speakers followed the Wade-Giles system although, to complicate the matter further, the Chinese Post Office had yet another system for place names. Peking (a Jesuit Romanisation some 400 years old) survived (in correct Wade-Giles it should be Pei-ching), as did Tientsin (Wade-Giles T’ien-chin) and Canton (a southern rendering of what should be, in Wade-Giles, Kuang-chou). A major city in this account is the coastal city of Qingdao (Pinyin), which was Tsingtau to its German occupiers and Tsing-tao to the Chinese Post Office (but should be Ch’ing-tao in Wade-Giles). Today, the official convention is the Chinese Pinyin system and these cities are known as Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao and Guangzhou, although the old names survive in certain contexts such as Peking University and the Canton Trade Fair.

We have adopted the Pinyin spellings but include the older versions in brackets on first mention.

Like place names, personal names were often rendered in non-standard versions. Sun Yat-sen would be Sun Zhongshan in pinyin, Chiang Kai-shek should be Jiang Jieshi and Wellington Koo is hard to recognise as Gu Weijun. We have used the modern standard Pinyin versions except where these nonstandard versions are better known.

LE GATEAU DES ROIS ET DES EMPEREURS

Henri Meyer’s cartoon, from Le Petit Journal of 16 January 1898, shows Britain’s Queen Victoria, matriarch of the colonialists, fretting over her erratic grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II; two months previously, he had ordered the merciless occupation of Qingdao by Germany. France’s Marianne, depicted as an innocent maiden – as one might expect in a French publication – watches over her dim-witted ally, the Czar of Russia. The Japanese samurai waits pensively for the opportunity to wield his sword; he did not have to wait long, plunging it into the hearts of Russia in 1904–5 and of China and Germany in 1914, at the very start of the Great War. A Chinese official looks helplessly on the scene.

Chapter 1

Japan sees an opportunity

In the summer of 1914, Japan saw an opportunity. On 15 August, a week before officially declaring war on Germany, the German ambassador in Tokyo, Arthur Graf von Rex (who had been trying to persuade Japan to align itself with soon to be victorious Germany) was presented with a Japanese ultimatum demanding that Germany withdraw all its warships from East Asian waters and hand over the German concession in Jiaozhou Bay [Kiaochow] (Shandong province) to Japan, for ‘eventual’ return to China. Receiving no answer to the demands, on 23 August, Japan declared war on Germany and on 2 September 1914, 23,000 Japanese troops landed on officially neutral Chinese soil about 100 miles north of Qingdao [Tsingtao, or, in German, Tsingtau], and marched inland. Coming late to the European occupation of Chinese territory, Germany had occupied the bay in 1897 on the pretext of reprisal for the murder of two German Roman Catholic missionaries in the south of Shandong province and ‘leased’ 552 square kilometres of territory around the bay, which provided a fine natural harbour for the German Far East naval squadron.

The German Empire came into being in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War; the following year, King Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor at Versailles. His ambitious grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was determined to catch up with the other European powers such as Britain, France and Russia, which had been exploiting China for half a century. He believed in the superiority of European over Asiatic peoples whom he saw as a threat to civilisation. He coined the phrase ‘Yellow Peril’ (gelbe Gefahr) and saw himself leading Europe in a campaign to defeat it. He had a dream in which he, as St Michael, led the other European nations, all dressed as women, in this campaign. When a newly industrialized and aggressive Japan inflicted a humiliating defeat on China in 1894–5, a further rival was added to the powers in the Far East.

Foreign missionaries in China, often stationed in remote villages far from consular protection, were frequent victims of anti-foreign violence. When the two German missionaries were murdered on the evening of All Saints Day 1897, probably by members of a local peasant secret society, the event was sufficient to provoke a response from Germany which seized the fine natural bay on the north of Shandong province. The seizure and occupation of Jiaozhou Bay was achieved through yet another of the humiliating ‘unequal treaties’ forced upon China which provoked considerable resentment and whose abolition was to be a major topic at the Versailles Peace Conference.

SHANDONG – CHINA’S KEY WAR AIM

Tsingtao was the heart of Germany’s enclave in Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius. Its recovery was of great symbolic importance and was to become one of China’s key war aims. Its civilian population in 1914 was about 55,000 (of which 3% were German); it has grown to the 2.7 million of Qingdao now. The construction of St Michael’s Cathedral was held back by Japan’s capture of Tsingtao and it was not completed until 1934. It was defaced and its clergy arrested during Mao Zedong’s era, but it is now an active church again.

Railways, mostly foreign, were deeply resented, as they eliminated porterage jobs, disturbed ancestral graves, sequestered farmland and put China in hock. The Shandong Railway (SEG), founded in 1899, financed by German banks and investors, began paying dividends in 1905 (3.25%) rising to 7.5% in 1913.

The Governor of Shandong tried, unsuccessfully, to buy shares and get board representation. One of SEG’s main purposes was to carry coal from the mines of another German company, SBG, needed for the East Asia Squadron, based at Tsingtao.

SBG’s output rose steadily, but much of its production was unsuitable for bunkering and was uneconomic because of the lower costs of small Chinese competitors, which relied more on human labour than expensive machinery. Its poor financial record led to its being taken over by SEG.

Tsingtao beer (no longer branded with a swastika) is marketed in supermarkets in Europe and America – a peaceful reconquest of the former colonizing powers.

NOTES: population, SEG and SBG; Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism by John Schreker, Harvard UP, 1971 and The Dragon and The Iron Horse RW Huenemann, Harvard UP, 1984. Coal production; Diplomatic Relations between China and Germany since 1898, by Feng Deng Diang, published in 1913.

At the mouth of Jiaozhou Bay, stood the town of Qingdao, later described as ‘one of the most fashionable watering-places of the Orient’. Originally a small fishing village, it was expanded by German occupation, into a model colonial city, redolent of towns and cities in the home country. There were familiar sounding streets, such as Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelmstrasse and Hohenloe Weg, lined with solid German-style buildings. There was a handsome Protestant church, there were schools, hospitals and a yacht club. An imposing railway station served the new Shandong Railway needed to exploit the province’s mineral wealth, particularly coal to fuel the expanding German navy in its Far Eastern activities. High above the town was a magnificent residence for the governor who was a senior naval officer, underlining the naval significance of the concession.

Electrification, sewage systems and clean drinking water were installed throughout the town, a rarity in China at the time. Banks and other commercial establishments were set up and many Chinese built businesses and houses there attracted by the secure and well-managed environment. Sun Yat-sen, main architect of the Chinese Republic remarked in 1912, ‘I am impressed. The city is a true model for China’s future.’ The Tsingtao Brewery, founded in 1903 under joint Anglo-German ownership but German management, produced a beer which is still enjoyed all over the world. Its early advertisements carried the swastika, an auspicious Buddhist symbol widely used in China before both its direction and significance were turned upside down by the Nazis.

Ships of the British Navy’s Pacific squadron made ‘courtesy visits’ to the German East Asia naval squadron in Qingdao: in 1913, HMS Monmouth and her crew were welcomed there, and in 1914, HMS Minotaur, Admiral Jerram’s flagship, called in. When the German aviator Günther Plüschow arrived in the spring of 1914, on the day of his arrival he watched a ‘big football match between German sailors and their comrades from the English flag-ship Good Hope’.¹

The background to Japan’s engagement was complex, involving a series of crossed messages. The German Minister in Peking, Baron Ago von Maltzan later to serve as Ambassador to the United States, seems to have been trying unsuccessfully to discuss the future of Germany’s concession in Shandong and its coal mines (of tremendous interest to coal-poor Japan) with the Chinese authorities and perhaps hand them back, whilst frantic messages were sent backwards and forwards between Peking, Tokyo, London and Washington.

On 3 August 1914 the American chargé d’affaires in Peking, John Van Antwerp MacMurray, reported that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had asked the Americans to try and make the belligerent European nations undertake not to engage in hostilities on Chinese territory.² On the very same day, the British Ambassador in Tokyo, Sir William Conyngham Greene, reported that, with reference to the Anglo–Japanese Alliance (1902, 1905, 1911) which guaranteed mutual support in the face of threat, he had been assured that the British could ‘count on Japan at once coming to the assistance of her ally with all her strength, if called upon to do so, leaving it entirely up to His Majesty’s Government to formulate the reason for and the nature of assistance required’. However, the eventual Japanese landing on 2 September was entirely decided by Japan, with no reference to or consultation with His Majesty’s Government.

Two days earlier, 1 August, the British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, had informed the Japanese Ambassador in London, Katsunosuke Inoue, that he ‘did not see that we were likely to have to apply to Japan under our Alliance’ for the British Foreign Office was narrowly preoccupied with British possessions in Asia and had no thought for German possessions in China.

The only way in which Japan could be brought in would be if hostilities spread to the Far East, e.g. an attack on Hong Kong by the Germans, or if a rising in India were to take place . . . but it might be as well to warn the Japanese government that in the event of war with Germany there might be a possibility of an attack on Hong Kong or Weihaiwei when we should look to them for support.³

Messages were certainly crossing, for the American Ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, reported on 11 August that, far from accepting that help was not needed, Sir Edward Grey had been informed that ‘Japan finds herself unable to refrain from war with Germany. . .’⁴ On 7 August, Britain, having declared war on Germany on 4 August, requested that ‘the Japanese fleet . . . hunt out and destroy the armed German merchant cruisers who are now attacking our commerce.’ Japan, however, saw the chance to take things further and on August 9, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Baron Katō Takaake, informed Sir William Conyngham Greene in Tokyo that: ‘Once a belligerent power, Japan cannot restrict her action only to the destruction of hostile enemy cruisers’ and suggested that the best way to destroy German maritime activity was to attack Qingdao as ‘destroying the German naval base at Jiaozhou [Kiaochow] would provide the casus belli to bring the Alliance into effective operation.’

The British started to backtrack rapidly, asking that Japan ‘postpone her war activities’ with a further message from the British Ambassador in Japan, ‘Great Britain asks Japan to limit its activities to the protection of commerce on the sea . . .’

German defences

The territory in question around Jiaozhou Bay was not well defended for the Germans had never anticipated a serious military challenge. However, on 4 August, after an announcement of ‘the danger of war’ six days earlier, the inhabitants of Qingdao learned that ‘the die was cast in Europe!’ but, as Günther Plüschow wrote, ‘Of course, no one for a moment thought about Japan . . .’

On 15 August, the Governor of Qingdao, a naval officer, Captain Alfred Meyer-Waldeck, responded to Japan’s demands to ‘withdraw the German warships at once from Japanese and Chinese waters’ and to ‘surrender the whole protectorate of Qiaozhou forthwith’ by referring to ‘the frivolity of the Japanese demands’ which ‘admit but one reply’.⁵ By this time, the small number of German troops stationed elsewhere in China, including those in Tianjin and the German Legation Guard in Peking had ‘quietly slipped away’ and ‘headed for Qingdao’, to join volunteers from Shanghai in the defence of the German concession.⁶ The Shanghai contingent included five musicians from Rudolf Buck’s Town Band, seriously compromising Shanghai concerts. The Times correspondent G.E. Morrison, belittling the Japanese military achievements, scornfully referred to Qingdao as ‘a weakly defended fort garrisoned by an untrained mob of German bank clerks and pot-bellied pastry-cooks.’⁷

At the outbreak of war, the armoured cruisers