Intimate Alienation: A Chinese Laborer’s Journal on the French Battlefield during World War I

During the First World War, over 140,000 Chinese laborers were recruited through governmental collaborations to supplement the workforce shortage and do non-combative work on European battlefields. Often neglected compared to combatants, non-combative laborers enacted a supportive and thus less masculine kind of work on the frontline. Chinese laborers, regarded as racially inferior, were treated as subordinates in the military hierarchy and forgotten after the victory. This paper approaches the intersectional issue of labor, race, war, and diaspora through reading a 257-entry journal of Sun Gan (1882–1961), one member of the Chinese Labor Corps who was recruited by the British government in 1917 and worked on the French battlefield for two years. Motivated by the opportunity to see the world and learn the Western modernity, Sun, a former primary teacher, came to the French battlefield, where he first did infrastructure work including digging trenches, carrying supplies, logging, repairing roads, cleaning locomotives, and later assisted the Young Men’s Christian Association in organizing educational activities in the Chinese Labor Corp. Extending the theory of intimacy from gender to race, and compounding it with the Marxist concept of alienation of labor, this paper contends that Sun’s experiences reveal a paradox: for one, he was alienated from the non-productive labor, racial and military hierarchy, and the war that his nation was not involved; for the other, he developed a deep emotional bond in the non-combative work, collaborated intimately with colleagues, and converted to Christianity as he believes in religious love as national salvation.