After responding to calls to serve in the British merchant navy in the Battle of the Atlantic, some 2,000 Chinese sailors remained in Liverpool at the end of the war. They underwent a secret Home Office campaign in 1945-46 to round them up and send them back east to the holds of British ships. A significant number had married British women and had children with them in the final years of the war. After boarding ships docked in the Mersey bound for Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, they were never seen by their families again. After decades of silence, the Home Office and the Labor Party – which was in power at the time under Clement Attlee – have now lamented a policy which the latter said had caused lasting damage to families, leaving “scars that they have run deep. through many generations”. The deportations were shrouded in secrecy for most of the 20th century, until the declassification, in the 1990s, of a batch of Home Office files entitled “Mandatory Repatriation of Unwanted Chinese Seamen” prompted a handful of their Liverpool-born descendants to set out campaigns for justice. Following questions in parliament by Liverpool Riverside MP Kim Johnson on behalf of her constituents, and an investigation by the Guardian, Immigration Secretary Kevin Foster agreed to launch an internal inquiry last July. The 22-page report, seen exclusively by the Guardian, uses shipping manifests, Home Office documents and marriage records to build a picture of the secret deportation campaign that began in 1945 and identifies some of the married Chinese sailors who were repatriated. Until now, the Home Office has consistently maintained that there has been no forced repatriation of married men, despite its own memos to Liverpool police and immigration officers referring to a “roundup” and describing a de facto manhunt. The report admits for the first time that there was a racial dimension to the campaign – a “willingness to address the large-scale coercion” of Chinese merchant seamen that was absent from similar discussions of the demobilization of European Allied troops. “The language used to explain and justify the proposed operation to repatriate surplus Chinese tank members is clearly racist and harmful,” the Home Office report concluded. “Negative racial stereotypes are evident in these discussions: Chinese seafarers … are characterized sui generis not simply as an employment problem, but as members of a criminal underclass.” Yvonne Foley, 76, whose Shanghainese father Nan Young was a ship’s engineer and repatriated in 1946, said the report was “very well balanced” and its findings vindicated her own years of campaigning and archival research in Worldwide. Foster, in a letter to Johnson, stopped short of fully apologizing for the Home Office’s historic actions, but said: “I am very sorry that some of those who served in the merchant navy during World War II were treated in this way.” . He pledged that the story of the Chinese seamen’s deportation would be used to educate Home Office staff about the history of race and immigration in Britain, to help them “understand the potential impact of immigration policies”. Johnson welcomed the report, saying it “paints a damning picture of British treatment of Chinese sailors in Liverpool, with families brutally torn apart despite their service to our country during the war”. He said: “It leaves no doubt that the Chinese community received racist and coercive treatment from the state. These events are a stain on our history and, unfortunately, there are still many parallels with the way minority and immigrant workers are treated in our country today.” A Labor Party spokesman said: “The Labor Party deeply regrets the British Government’s policy of 1945 which saw the repatriation of an unspecified number of Chinese seamen who had supported the war effort and thereby had children in the UK. The policy of repatriation caused permanent damage to families and scars that have lasted many generations.” While the Home Office investigation brought to light some new details, it did not show a central record of all repatriated seafarers and the report admits much information is still missing. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every day at 7am. BST The missing files include those belonging to a special branch whose officers carried out secret raids on private homes and boarding houses in Liverpool after the war to investigate the “authenticity” of marriages. “No sign of them [special branch] investigations remain,” the report said. Further gaps in the records can be attributed to the fact that many thousands of Chinese seamen were repatriated on ships on which their names were never recorded. A handwritten shipping manifest found by the Guardian for the departure of the SS Diomed on 8 December 1945 read simply: “100 Chinese seamen sent by Home Office. The manifesto was prepared by HM Immigration.” If they reached mainland China, the sailors would have returned to a nation erupting in full-scale civil war, making return to Britain almost impossible.
