From the Tsar’s Railway to the Red Army: The Experience of Chinese Labourers in Russia during the First World War and Bolshevik Revolution by Mark O’Neill
While several of the Penguin China “specials” have drawn lines between the First World War and the later Communist revolution, most of these lines have passed through Europe, notable France. However, another line passes through Russia. From the Tsar’s Railway to the Red Army traces the virtually unknown episode of Chinese labourers who went to help Russia’s war efforts and who ended being caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Author Mark O’Neill has already contributed a volume about the Chinese labourers on the Western front (The Chinese Labour Corps: The Forgotten Chinese Labourers of the First World War) to which this can be considered a companion. This is still an under-researched area and the true number of Chinese laborers sent to Russia is unknown, but the most likely estimate puts the figure around 200,000 men, more indeed than the 135,000 workers that went to France and Belgium. And they had it far worse, perhaps the most tragic chapter in 400 years of Chinese emigration.
The author begins by sketching the background of the historical relations between the two countries. The Russian empire had greatly expanded east and south during the second half of the nineteenth century to the Amur River and beyond. This was a period of extreme weakness for China, which had to accept the river as the new border; it also allowed Russia to build a port and naval base at Vladivostok. Russia needed and used Chinese labor to develop this area and also to construct railways, including the Far Eastern segment of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the China Eastern Railway (CER), through the north of Manchuria, via Harbin, to Vladivostok.
Russia’s involvement in the War was disastrous from the start, with a devastating number of casualties. China offered a ready supply for the ensuing shortage of workers, and there was a previous experience. However, Beijing lost control of the recruiting. Many workers went to Russia without proper contracts that would have guaranteed basic rights. Poorly equipped and fed, without any protection, the workers were left vulnerable to abuse by middlemen or Russians employers in a web of corruption akin to what today would be termed human trafficking.
Chinese workers began to arrive in Russia in 1916 and were sent all over the Empire. Thousands worked and died at the front. Conditions could be extreme, nowhere more so than in the construction of the railway line from the capital of Petrograd (St Petersburg) to the new ice-free port of Murmansk, on the Kola Peninsula above the Arctic Circle, where many perished due to extreme weather, malnutrition and disease. The 10,000 Chinese who worked here were not alone: they were joined by some 50,000 prisoners of war from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies and 30,000 hired Russian peasants. Chinese workers were also sent to mine coal in the Donets Basin in eastern Ukraine, some of the most hazardous mines in the world. One of the workers, Li Zhen-dong, reflected on their plight:
We worked in a forest not far from Petrograd. We were seeking a better life but were slaves to hardship. Working in Russia was like working in China. We had to work fifteen hours a day and slept in caves that were humid; they were crowded and dirty. We were paid little, scarcely enough to feed ourselves.
Conditions worsened as the war drew on, for ordinary Russians but more so for the Chinese, who lacked the means to return home, while the Russian employers or Chinese contractors would not repatriate them. The workers were moved to one job to another, and sold, like slaves. Inflation shot up, the shortages of food and fuel became acute, plus the enormous casualties sustained by the Russian army, all led to political upheavals with a society in disarray.
When the Tsarist regime fell and Lenin made a separate peace with Germany, the Chinese labourers were left stranded in a foreign land. Some were driven to begging or crime, which stigmatized the Chinese community as a whole. To alleviate the situation, some Chinese students, later joined by Chinese diplomats and businesspeople, set up networks of solidarity, such as the Union of Chinese Workers in Russia (UCWR) based in Petrograd. The UCWR found more cooperation with the Soviets than with the Tsarist regime, and developed to become an organisation to reckon with, led by Liu Zerong, a native from Guangzhou, who in March 1919 represented overseas Chinese at the first meeting of the Communist International.
Thousands of Chinese joined the revolution and the Red Army to escape from their miserable situation, or from intimidation, or lured by the promises of a new era for the working class. Prominent among them was Ren Fuchen, considered China’s first Bolshevik. Born in 1884 in Liaoning, at fourteen he had started working for a Russian company building the railway from Harbin to Dalian. He joined the Bolsheviks and later became a commander of the Chinese Red Eagle battalion. He was killed in action in November 1918. The book’s title summarises in his personal story those of many Chinese workers.
The Russian Civil War also led to China’s involvement on its easternmost border and, eventually, Chinese civilians were evacuated from Vladivostok.
Relations between the Soviet Union and China—paramount for an understanding of modern history—began with these workers. Probably for the first time, the bleak story of the lost contingent of Chinese workers has been brought to light for a larger public.