While studying in the School of Oriental and African Studies library a few years ago, I stumbled across Xu Guoqi's China and the Great War and was taken aback by the book's title. I had a degree in modern history from Oxford and had taught history in secondary schools for several years, and yet I knew nothing about China's involvement in the First World War. I abandoned the essay I was supposed to be writing, borrowed the book, and set off on a journey of historical discovery. Hunting down every bit of information I could find on the topic, I interrupted family holidays to visit Chinese cemeteries in northern France and eventually wrote a novel about what I had discovered. The potential impact of idly browsing in a library should never be underestimated.
I quickly discovered that the story of China and the Great War is not an incidental tale, a mere coda to a greater European symphony. The Chinese experience of that terrible conflict provides a salutary reminder that the Great War was indeed a world war. The narrative with which we are most familiar tends to focus on European battles and European ambitions. But if we ignore the war's Asian dimension, we inevitably develop an inadequate understanding of 20th-century history. What happened during the war and afterwards at Versailles defined the nature of Sino-Japanese relations for the next hundred years, provoked a political and cultural revolution in China, and led indirectly to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party.
Getting to grips with China's involvement in the Great War also forces us to consider some unsavoury aspects of British history, because we can only understand the events of 1914 by coming to terms with imperial history and the semi-colonisation of China in the 19th century. By the time the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion were over, more than a dozen European countries had acquired territorial interests in China, annexing territories such as Hong Kong and Taiwan and establishing enclaves, known as concessions, in west-coast ports including Shanghai and Tianjin. My students now learn about the Opium Wars, but the first I heard about them was when I saw an exhibition in a Hong Kong museum as an adult: somehow Britain's role in those inglorious conflicts had dropped off the syllabus when I was studying history at school and university.
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