At the launch of the campaign the Chair of the Strategic Partnership Board, Steve Lau, delivered a speech in which he said,

Over 6,000,000 medals were awarded after the war. Let’s forget that the Chinese received bronze rather than the silver medals everyone else got. All of those 6,000,000 medals had the name of the recipient inscribed on it – all except for the Chinese – for them, just their roll number.

One point within that speech was recently queried, namely whether or not it was accurate to state “everyone else” got silver medals. Steve Lau offered the following response.

I accept the point that there were some others who received bronze medals. To put this into context the statistics for the medals are as follows:

98.3%   Medals in silver.

1.5%   Medals in Bronze issued to the CLC (87.2% of all bronze medals).

0.3%  Other bronze medals issued.

That means 99.8% rather than 100% of the “everyone else” referred to got silver medals (see explanation note below). Nonetheless, on reflection the point is inaccurate, even though it was an aside to the main point I was making – the reduction of Chinese to mere numbers, and this, to my knowledge, did not happen to any others.

It was not my intention to mislead, and in fact I’m very conscious that we need to be as accurate as we can be.  I was aware of the statistics when I wrote the speech, and although it is now quite apparent that in trying to keep the speech flowing using broad brushstrokes rather than paint the finer detail, on this point I simplified things too much, and in the process overlooked 14,000 people who served in the war effort. In retrospect I should have omitted the point rather than reduce it until it became inaccurate and failed to honour those 14,000 people. I apologise for any confusion or offence I may have caused. I’ll certainly use this as a learning point for the future.

Read in full the Launch speech by Steve Lau.

A short note on numbers and calculations.
The actual number of war medals issued was approximately 6.61 million. 110,000 of these were bronze the rest silver. (source: http://www.grahamtall.co.uk). As the Chinese Labour Corps (as best we know) numbered 96,000 men. It follows that 14,000 bronze medals (110,000 minus 96,000) were awarded to non-Chinese Labour Corps members. By adding the 14,000 to the 6.5 million people who received the silver medal, we can quantify how many people in total, other than embers of the Chinese Labour Corps received medals (the so-called “everybody else). It is 6,514,000 people.

“Everybody else” suggests 100%, and we know this was not the case. By dividing 6,500,000 by 6,514,000) we discover that the actual percentage of other people who received a silver rather than a bronze medal was 99.8%.