Surely we should invite our Chinese friends to the Cenotaph

The following article, by Professor Michhael Wood, appeared in the April 2015 edition of BBC History Magazine. Our thanks to historyextra.com and the editorial team’s kind permission for us to reproduce the article.

We’ve been filming in China on and off for many months now, and still enjoying every minute. It’s nearly 30 years since I spent a lot of time here, and there have been massive changes since Deng Xiaoping’s ‘opening up’ that began in the late 1970s. But some things don’t change, the Chinese people’s habitual hospitality being one of them, as well as their love of family and friends.

I have also been struck by their fascination with history. Every site we have visited, from Sun Yat-sen’s memorial to the Terracotta Army, from the Great Wall to the historic cities of the Yangtze valley, has been crammed with visitors: China’s internal history tourism is on a staggering scale. At Shaoxing, a town of great writers from Zhang Dai, the Ming Proust, to the feminist poet Qiu Iin (executed here in 1907) and Lu Xun, China’s great modern radical writer, you could hardly move for the weekend crowds. Hasty vox pops elicited scores of opinions on which was their favourite story, and how Lu Xun had ‘given voice to the nation’.

All of which underlines how easy it is to see history from our own point of view, and to not put ourselves in others’ shoes: an essential exercise for historians, as indeed for all of us. Thinking of China, I was reminded of this while watching the commemorations for the First World War at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day. It was extraordinarily moving to see veterans of the Second World War marching past, perhaps for the last time; and also to see representatives from Commonwealth countries laying wreaths.

But having been working in China over the last couple of years, and trying to see things from the Chinese side, as one must, strange as it may sound I found myself thinking: why aren’t ‘we’ there? After all, 100,000 Chinese worked in the British Army Labour Corps on the western front, a fascinating tale told in a book by Xu Guoqi, Strangers on the Western Front (HUP, 2011). Another 40,000 worked for the French. As Xu shows, they didn’t kowtow meekly to their European masters. In often grim conditions they kept up their cultural traditions, brightening up their camps with Chinese lanterns and ornate artwork. They printed their own newspaper, flew painted kites, held stilt-walking contests and, even though dressed in regulation puttees and khaki, held with dignity onto their Chinese identity. Historians estimate that at least 10,000 died, maybe twice that. Some 2,000 have known graves, including a few in UK cemeteries, in Plymouth, at Shorncliffe near Folkestone and at Anfield in Liverpool. The biggest is that at Noyelles-sur-Mer by the mouth of the Somme, looking over the English Channel, where a Chinese gateway leads to 842 tombstones, in the standard white stone of the War Graves Commission, but carved with Chinese characters and Confucian as well a Christian tags: “A good reputation lasts forever.”

The war played an important role in Chinese history too, for it was partly in response to the blatant injustices of the Treaty of Versailles (the Japanese were allowed to hold onto their gains on the Chinese mainland and were given the confiscated German concessions) that the famous student protest of 4th May 1919 gave expression to the seething discontents of the Chinese people, one of China’s modern moments of destiny.

The Second World War (as we often forget) was also massive import for China. It started two years earlier and went on longer than “our” war. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931 (On which the League of Nations, predecessor of the UN was shamefully silent). Then in summer 1937 they attacked China itself, massacring the people of Nanjing that December, as one may now see commemorated in the harrowing museum in the city. The Second World War continued in China till the Japanese surrender in September 1945 a huge part go the war in the Pacific (where half of all casualties were Chinese).

Few countries suffered more from war, famine and destruction in the 20th century, and the Chinese like to point out that, along with the UK, USA and USSR, China was the ‘Fourth Ally’ against fascism. For that reason might one hope that the next time we commemorate the war dead who fought in or with the British Army, we invite our Chinese friends and fellow citizens too?

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. His most recent TV series was King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons.

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