Watching a bit of CNA today brought this example of pretty shameful British behaviour to my attention for the first time. I see now that there was a long article in The Guardian about it last year, from which these extracts come.
First, I didn't know this about Liverpool before:
By most reckonings, Liverpool has the oldest
Chinese community in Europe. At the root of this relationship was the
shipping group Alfred Holt & Company, founded in Liverpool in 1866,
and their major subsidiary the Blue Funnel Line, whose cargo steamships
connected Shanghai, Hong Kong and Liverpool. Alfred Holt & Co
quickly became one of Britain’s biggest merchant shipping companies,
importing silk, cotton and tea. Over time, some of the Chinese seamen
settled in Liverpool, starting businesses to serve those on shore leave.
Records from the turn of the century show Chinese-run boarding houses,
grocers, laundries, tailors, a chandler and, in Mr Kwok Fong, even a
private detective. The 1911 census shows 400 Chinese-born residents,
with many more coming and going. By the end of the first world war, the
community numbered in the thousands.
So, in World War 2:
The second world war would bring many more Chinese seamen to Liverpool. China was, in historian Rana Mitter’s formulation,
“the forgotten ally”. Not only did China play a vital role in the fight
against Japan in Asia, Chinese seamen also kept the British merchant
navy going. Beginning in 1939, Alfred Holt & Company, along with
Anglo-Saxon Petroleum (part of Shell), recruited men in Shanghai,
Singapore and Hong Kong. They were to crew the ships on missions across
the Atlantic, bringing essential supplies of oil, munitions and food to
the UK, and escorting convoys to the front. This was exceptionally
dangerous work. About 3,500 merchant vessels were sunk by Nazi U-boats, and more than 72,000 lives were lost on the Allied side.
One Chinese merchant seaman, Poon Lim, became famous
for surviving 133 days adrift on a tiny raft, after his British vessel
was torpedoed by a U-boat in the south Atlantic. Lim and his countrymen
were hailed
as firm comrades in a 1944 Ministry of Information propaganda film, The
Chinese in Wartime Britain. “East met west, and liked it,” explains the
film’s narrator in his finest Pathe News accent, as we are shown these
new friends working as doctors, engineers and scientists, and then
recovering on land in between missions, drinking tea, practising
calligraphy and playing table tennis. The Chinese merchant seamen fought
“shoulder to shoulder in the greatest battle of naval history,
alongside their British seamen comrades. They, too, brave the torpedoes
and the bombs and the mines, making history under fire … life at sea
fuels a unique spirit of comradeship between the men of all nations.”
For the Chinese seamen, official British gratitude and friendship did not extend far beyond the silver screen.
In reality, they were (at least initially) paid half of what the British seamen got and did the worst and most dangerous jobs. A strike improved their pay. But their numbers were large:
During the war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping
industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat,
and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis
attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines. The seamen were a
vital part of the allied war effort, some of the “heroes of the fourth
service” in the words of one
book title about the merchant navy. Working below deck in the engine
rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic run under
heavy attack from German U-boats.
But the kicker at the end of the war was that the government decided that they couldn't stay in England, and were secretly and forcefully deported back to various Chinese ports, leaving behind wives and children in many cases. (Apparently, the families often initially assumed they had been abandoned by their partner or father.)
The plan was deceptive in many respects - dates were amended on papers allowing for the police to treat them as "overstaying", and men with families were deliberately not told of their right to stay:
Although marrying a local woman did not give the
Chinese men the right to British citizenship, the Home Office was aware
that it did give them the right to stay in the UK. This information was
deliberately withheld. On 14 November, Liverpool Immigration Officer JR
Garstang had written to London that “it would be unwise … to give any
indication to the Chinese that because a man is married to a
British-born woman he will have a claim to domicile in the UK”. In a
follow-up letter, sent on 15 December, Garstang reiterated that it was
best not to give the married men “a lever in their claim for domicile”.
The authorities were determined to finish the job they had started.
The
secret repatriation campaign was not a placid or cooperative affair.
Written records suggest that it was conducted as a manhunt. The phrase
“roundup” is used repeatedly in official correspondence. An immigration
officers’ report to the Home Office filed on 15 July 1946 announced
that: “Two whole days were spent in an intensive search of approximately
150 Pool boarding-houses, private boarding houses and private houses.”
They had “spread the net as widely as possible”, they promised, alerting
police chiefs across the country to look out for Chinese seamen. The
report concluded: “When the operation is completed within the next few
days I shall be satisfied that every possible step has been taken to
secure a maximum repatriation of Chinese.”
I also didn't know before that the Chinese had even been of substantial assistance to Britain in World War 1:
Now that the war had come to an end and
Japanese troops in China had surrendered, the Chinese coast opened up
again – allowing the British government to commence, in its own words,
“the usual steps for getting rid of foreign seamen whose presence here
is unwelcome”. (Those “usual steps” probably refer to an earlier mass
deportation: 95,000 Chinese men were recruited by Britain as
non-combatant labourers and merchant seamen in the first world war. They
were not allowed to settle in the UK after the war, either, and their
sacrifice has likewise long been overlooked.)
Actually, a lengthy article at the
South China Morning Post explains the story of the Chinese sent to help Europe in the earlier war:
Chinese workers helped rebuild war-torn Europe, says Hong Kong
University historian Xu Guoqi. About 140,000 worked for American,
British and French troops in France, his research shows. Up to half a
million Chinese workers laboured on the eastern front for Tsarist
Russia, before the empire crumbled in the 1917 Communist revolution,
according to the unpublished research of historian Li Zhixue of Jinan
University.
Xu, who traced the journey of Chinese labourers from Shandong to France in his 2011 book Strangers on the Western Front
published by Harvard University Press, says the mostly illiterate
farmers played a crucial role not only in the war, but in shaping
China’s role in the new world order that emerged as empires fractured
into nation-states worldwide.
Many died, too, in tragedies of war:
By trains and ships, the Chinese made their way to Europe. Hundreds,
if not thousands, died along the way. Xu estimated at least 700
perished. Between 400 and 600 workers died on February 17, 1917, alone
when a German submarine sank the French passenger ship Athos near Malta.
Many more died crossing Russia, according to Li’s research.
About 3,000 Chinese workers died in France, on their way to the
Western front in Northern France, or on their return to China between
1916 and 1920, Xu estimates. Up to 30,000 Chinese died on the Russian
front, estimates Jinan University scholar Li.
To avoid further German submarine attacks, Britain shipped more than
84,000 Chinese labourers through Canada in a campaign kept secret for
years in the then British dominion.
“In view of the suspicion that certain Chinese are being used as a
medium of communication by enemy agents”, Canada banned news outlets
from reporting on the train convoys that crossed the country on their
way to France.
I had no idea.
Both of these stories would be a good source for fresh stories for novels or cinema too, I reckon. Barely know history is always good for that...
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