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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2022
The Yunnan–Indochina railway, built by France across the China–Vietnam border between 1898–1910, never realized the expansionist dreams of French colonialists in Indochina and therefore has been studied as a failure of French imperialism. Taking a labor perspective, this article examines the labor conflicts along the Yunnan railway against the backdrop of the emergence of a global labor market where different colonial powers competed for cheap Chinese labor after the emancipation of black slaves. At the time of the railway's construction, access to cheap labor was so central to colonial competition that the metropolitan, colonial, and business agents of the French empire found themselves in a dire conflict over labor shortages in Yunnan. To the extent that France failed to restrain the railway company agents from abusing the labor force, other European colonial powers used worker misery to dispute French claims to conducting a “civilizing mission.” At the same time, both Qing imperial officials and Chinese nationalists advanced their arguments for national sovereignty in the name of protecting their national subjects, i.e., the railway workers. As a result, French recruiters had to reconsider the terms of Chinese coolie employment, increase wages, improve worker contracts, and invest in welfare systems. In sum, worker resistance during the construction of the Yunnan railway not only delayed the railway's completion and diminished French colonial prestige in the region but also empowered the workers, giving them leverage to increase the value of their labor in a market extending beyond Chinese national borders.
1. The Yunnan–Indochina railway covered a distance of 859 km from Kunming to Haiphong. The Chinese section of the railway (465 km) ascended from 76 m in Hekou, the beginning station of the China section, to 2,030 m in Kunming through mountains and across rivers via 158 tunnels, 22 iron bridges, and 108 stone bridges. Yifang Cheng, “Dang'an jilu xia de dian yue tielu [the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway in Archival Records], Yunnan Dang'an 10 (2017): 40.
2. Rather than studying coolie labor in relation to slavery, Evelyn Hu-Dehart argued that it was the first step to free labor for many overseas Chinese. Hu-Dehart, E., “From Slavery to Freedom: Chinese Coolies on the Sugar Plantations of Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” Labour History 113 (2017): 31–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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5. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995).
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8. Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919–1927 (Stanford, CA, 1968), 131.
9. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham, NC, 2002), 48.
10. Revising the orthodox position with a case from noncoastal China, Joshua Howard argues that it was through struggle that Chinese workers turned themselves into a class. J. Howard, Workers At War: Labor in China's Arsenals, 1937–1953 (Stanford, CA, 2004).
11. Letter of P. Badie, the apostolic missionary, to P. Oster, December 11, 1904, Ministère des Affaires Étrangeres, Archives Diplomatiques, Chine, NS 501.
12. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964); Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA, 1986); Emily Honig, Sisters, and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, CA, 1986).
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15. Michel Bruguière, “Le chemin de fer du Yunnan. Paul Doumer et la politique de l'intervention française en Chine, 1898–1902, Revue D'Histoire Diplomatique I-III (1963).
16. Robert Lee discusses how France subsequently prioritized economic interests over politics in their rivalry with Britain in China. Robert Lee, France and the Exploitation of China, 1885–1901 (Hong Kong, 1989). Later histories of the railway have focused more on the encounters between French colonial agents and Indigenous populations, drawing on newfound evidence from the personal archives of French diplomats and company employees. Polsana, Vatthana, “Technology and Empire: A Colonial Narrative of the Construction of the Tonkin–Yunnan Railway,” Critical Asian Studies 47 (2015): 537–557Google Scholar; Bernard, Locard, and Marbotte, Le chemin de fer du Yunnan: une aventure française en Chine: d'après les correspondances et les photographes de Albert Marie et Georges-Auguste Marbotte (Bordeaux, 2016).
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18. Paul Doumer, Situation de l'Indo-Chine, 1897–1901 (Hanoi, 1902), 3–4.
19. Gerard Sasges, Imperial Intoxication: Alcohol and the Making of Colonial Indochina (Honolulu, 2017), 51. Diana Kim adds that creating the common budget in Indochina also derived from an effort to give confidence to external investors. Diana Kim, Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia (Princeton, NJ, 2020), 158–160. For the importance of Yunnan opium for the Indochinese economy, see Chantal Descours-Gatin, Quand l'opium finançait la colonisation en Indochine: l’élaboration de la régie générale de l'opium, 1860 à 1914 (Paris, 1992).
20. Trang, Phan T.H., “Paul Doumer: Aux origines d'un grand projet, le chemin de fer Transindochinois,” Histoire, Économie, et Société 30 (2011): 115–140Google Scholar. The Yunnan railway project's proponents expected “more than 100 million francs worth of industrial orders from France.” The report prepared by the Colonial Commission in charge of examining the bill for the approval of the convention for the construction of the Haiphong–Yunnan-sen Railway, presented by Deputy Maurice Ordinaire, June 24, 1901, NS 496.
21. In the Fashoda Incident, France had to withdraw from its Fashoda expedition in Egypt, which started against Britain in 1898. In the end, France left control of Egypt to Britain in return for dominance over Morocco. Following the incident, French anxiety over British colonial rivalry was commonly called the “Fashoda syndrome.”
22. Lee, France and the Exploitation of China, 190–203. Doumer was planning to use potential disturbances by the Muslim and Miao minorities as a pretext to annex the province. Nicole Tixier, “La Chine dans la stratégie impériale: le rôle du Quai d'Orsay et de ses agents,” in L'esprit économique impérial (1830–1970): Groupes de pression et réseaux du patronat colonial en France et dans l'empire (Paris, 2008), 79.
23. For example, in a letter to the governor-general, Mengzi Consul Dejean de la Batie complained about the alarming activities of Colonel Pennequin in Yunnan. Based on his interactions with the mandarins, the consul concluded that after all the military missions sent from Indochina, China would consent to the railway only if a private company built it. Dejean de la Batie to Doumer, December 10, 1897, NS 494.
24. Emmanuelle Saada, “The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and Domination in the ‘Colonial Situation,’” French Politics, Culture & Society 20 (2002): 98–120.
25. François to Delcassé, November 20, 1903, NS 499.
26. Réau, “Note sur le chemin de fer du Yunnan,” December 1905, NS 503.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Martínez, Julia, “‘Unwanted Scraps’ or ‘An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People’? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo,” International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (2017): 79–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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31. Flayelle to the company, April 22, 1910, NS 510.
32. Oliver Tappe discusses the role of debt in forcing the Vietnamese into indentured labor. Oliver Tappe, “Variants of Bonded Labour in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Bonded Labor: Global and Comparative Perspectives (18th–21st Century), ed. Damir-Geilsdorf, Ulrike Lindler (Bielefeld, 2016), 103–131.
33. David W. Del Testa, “Workers, Culture, and the Railroads in French Colonial Indochina, 1905–1936,” French Colonial History 2 (2002): 181–198.
34. Consul Leduc was conveying the opinion of the company, November 28, 1904, NS 501.
35. Leduc to Delcassé, November 28, 1904, NS 501.
36. Casenave to Delcassé, June 4, 1904, NS 501.
37. The British government was the first to sign an official treaty with the Qing government for coolie emigration and continued to revise the terms of the coolie recruitment as needed. Of course, the existence of rules and regulations did not mean that Chinese workers received better treatment in British and other plantations. Ngai, Mae M., “Trouble on the Rand: The Chinese Question in South Africa and the Apogee of White Settlerism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (2017): 59–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a comparison of French and British practices of coolie employment, see Stanziani, A., “Local Bondage in Global Economies: Servants, Wage Earners, and Indentured Migrants in Nineteenth-Century France, Great Britain, and the Mascarene Islands,” Modern Asian Studies 47 (2013): 1218–1251CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38. Casenave, June 4, 1904, NS 501.
39. Implementing a universal contract labor law was still incomplete and on French colonists’ agenda as late as 1929. Martínez, “Unwanted Scraps,” 86–87.
40. Casenave to Delcassé, June 4, 1904, NS 501.
41. Ulrike Lindner, “Indentured Labour in Sub-Saharan Africa (1870–1918): Circulation of Concepts between Imperial Powers,” in Bonded Labor, 59–82.
42. Gaston Kahn to Dubail, May 4, 1905, NS 502.
43. Note by Casenave, May 8, 1905, NS 502.
44. For a discussion of “coolie as commodity” and how the British worked to create a free labor market in China, see Adam Mckeown, “The Social Life of Chinese Labor,” in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. E. Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (Durham, NC, 2011), 62–83.
45. Alessandro Stanziani, “The Abolition of Slavery and the ‘New Labor Contract’ in French Equatorial Africa, 1890–1914,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia, ed. G. Campbell and A. Stanziani (New York, 2019), 236.
46. Ibid., 239–240.
47. The idea of a free labor market was not the same everywhere. For instance, in the Straits Settlements, the British saw government intervention against the monopoly of Chinese brokers essential for the maintenance of a free labor market. Mckeown, “The Social Life of Chinese Labor,” 75–79.
48. Leduc to Delcassé, December 5, 1904, NS 501.
49. Leduc to the Foreign Ministry, August 20, 1906, NS 505.
50. Kahn to Destabeau, March 12, 1906, NS 504.
51. Flayelle to the Mengzi consul, March 10, 1906, NS 504.
52. Flayelle to the Foreign Ministry, March 18, 1906; Flayelle to the Mengzi consul, March 10, 1906, NS 504.
53. Confidential telegram of Yunnan Viceroy to the Customs Daotai, August 2, 1905, NS 502.
54. Dubail to Delcassé, May 31, 1905, NS 502.
55. Clémentel to the company, December 18, 1905, NS 689.
56. Leduc to Delcassé, June 15, 1905, NS 502.
57. Dupont to Leduc, May 25, 1905, NS 502.
58. Prince Qing to Dubail, September 15, 1905, NS 502.
59. The Proclamation of Viceroy Cen Chunxuan, December 1, 1905, NS 504; the Minister of Colonies to the Foreign Ministry, May 2, 1906, NS 504.
60. The piece titled “Striking Injustices” was published in Der Ostasiatische Lloyd in 1905. I use the partial French translation attached to the official correspondence between Dubail and Rouvier dated October 20, 1905, NS 503. “Li” was a Chinese unit of length, approximately half a kilometer.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. D. W. Crofts, “A Grave Scandal,” in North China Daily News, June 20, 1906.
64. Ibid.
65. Francophile, “A Grave Scandal.”
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Emmanuelle Sibeud, “Une libre pensée impériale? Le Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes (ca.1892–1914), Mil neuf cent. Revue d'histoire intellectuelle 27 (2009): 57–74.
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71. Sheng Xue, “Faren yu Yunnan [the French and Yunnan],” in YZX, 361.
72. V. Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was first published in 1916, and Kwame Nkrumah's Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism was first published in 1965. In a recent study of Chinese railroad workers employed at the Transcontinental Railroad, Manu Karuka has defined this process through which indigenous lands were appropriated in the United States as “railroad colonialism.” Karuka, Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland, CA, 2019).
73. Xia Yi, “Wei dian yue tielu zaocheng jinggao quan dian [a Warning to Yunnan on the Completion of the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway],” in YZX, 515.
74. Sheng Zhe, “You dian shu lue [a Tour in Yunnan],” in YZX, 344.
75. After endless complaints about the crimes committed against foreigners, Governor-General Beau visited Yunnan in mid-1906 to personally investigate the circumstances. The governor concluded that the complaints were exaggerated, and the French gendarme forces were doing their job properly in Mengzi and Hekou. The only problem was the Annamites brought from Tonkin, whom he described as the “dregs of Tonkin cities.” This piece must be written after the visit. Beau to the Minister of Colonies, May 28, 1906, NS 505.
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77. Boi Chau Phan, Overturned Chariot: The Autobiography of Phan-Bôi-Châu (Honolulu, 1999), 109, 126.
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80. The National Archives of the UK, FO 228/2639, 24.
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83. Chunfu Sun, “466 gongli dian yue tielu shang de qi wan tiao xingming [70,000 lives on the 466 km Yunnan–Vietnam Railway], Wenshi Tiandi (2011), 14–18. For the railway rights recovery movement, Rankin, Mary Backus, “Nationalistic Contestation and Mobilization Politics: Practice and Rhetoric of Railway-Rights Recovery at the End of the Qing,” Modern China 28 (2002): 315–361CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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86. Réau to Bapst, May 20, 1908, NS 507.
87. Ibid.
88. The report submitted by Mengzi consul, July 1908, NS 240.
89. The Indochina governor to the Ministry of Colonies, June 6, 1908, NS 240.
90. Dewei Fan quotes from Hu Hanmin's report to Sun Yatsen, “Yunnan huaqiao yu wu shen yunnan hekou qiyi,” 24.
91. Shi Fu, “Dian yue pangbian ji tiedao zhi shikuang [The Yunnan-Vietnam Border and the Situation of the Railway],” November 1907, in YZX, 460–77.
92. Company to the Minister of Colonies, November 17, 1905, NS 503.
93. Yunnan Railway Office's memorial to the Yun-Gui Viceroy for recruiting three thousand workers, Xingcheng Zhuang et al., Dian yue tielu shiliao huibian [Historical Documents on the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway] (Kunming, 2014), 20.
94. Leduc to Delcassé, February 2, 1905, NS 501.
95. Genty to Delcassé, February 22, 1906, NS 689.
96. Documents Parlementaires, Séance March 9, 1909, NS 510. Chinese sources give the number eighteen thousand. Yunnan sheng zong gong hui, Yunnan gongren yundong shi 1872–2000 [The history of the Yunnan Workers’ Movement, 1872–2000] (Kunming, 2003), 12.
97. Note sur la question de la rétrocession du chemin de fer du Yunnan à la Chine, August 7, 1907, NS 506.
98. Bourgeois to the Foreign Ministry, February 10, 1909, NS 508.
99. The French minister in Beijing to Pichon, February 22, 1909, NS 694.
100. Frederick Cooper, “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 412.
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