ABSTRACT
To Russia, however, the First World War brought a new and different flow of Chinese migrants. Russia, like other Allied powers, recruited Chinese workers to take the place of Russian men in railway construction, coal mines, and forestry. First the ban on the use of foreign labour was lifted in the Far East, then in the mines of the Donetsk Basin in the Ukraine, on the Murmansk railway in the northern part of European Russia, and so on. Russian and Chinese contractors started recruitment in Manchuria, then expanded to Chefoo, Zhili, Shanghai, and Chinese Turkestan. A single Chinese company sent 20,000 labourers to fell trees in Smolensk Province west of Moscow (Larin 1998: 281-2). Estimates for the total number of Chinese labourers recruited during the war range from 50,000 to 500,000. Larin believes that the figure of 100,000, which originated at the Chinese Embassy in Moscow in 1916, is closer to the truth. This would make their number second only to France (Larin 1998: 284).
