Historians estimate that there were more than 41 million military and civilian casualties in World War I, with over 18 million people killed. This made the Great War (1914-18) one of the deadliest conflicts in human history.

While the focus of the war was in Europe and the battle between the Allies and the Central Powers, large parts of Asia were involved directly or indirectly in the conflagration. Although some countries remained neutral, others sent troops to key battlefronts, and about 140,000 Chinese labourers went to work for American, British and French troops in France.

However, this involvement has been largely overlooked by authors and there has been little academic research into this aspect of the global conflict. In his 2017 book, Asia and the Great War: a shared history, Professor Xu Guoqi investigates the collective impact of World War I on societies in nations such as India, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and China.

Professor Xu is a renowned historian, a leading authority on modern China, a prolific author in both English and Chinese, and is the Kerry Group Professor in Globalisation History at the Department of History at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). His work centres around questions that have intrigued scholars and policy makers for years: What is China and who are the Chinese? His studies are focused on China’s changing positions in the world and Chinese self-identification with other countries from ancient times to the present day.

As part of his research, Professor Xu’s studies include the international and transnational history of modern China. His trilogy of books on the history of China’s internationalisation has been credited with fundamentally shaping and transforming the study of modern China and its interactions with the rest of the world, and his ongoing shared history series has opened new areas of study for historians to understand the shared history among Asians and between Asia and the West. He is currently working on the third in the series, tentatively titled Idea of China.

Professor Xu was educated in Mainland China and the United States, and received his PhD in history from Harvard University. He was the first and permanent holder of the Wen Chao Chen Chair in History and East Asian Studies at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Prior to joining HKU in July 2009, he was a Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

In recognition of his research and writing on contemporary international relations in Asia, Professor Xu has been awarded the Shigemitsu Fellowship by the Global Culture Center of The Japan Society of Boston. He is also a recipient of HKU’s Outstanding Researcher Award.

As an author, he has written about how seminal events, such as World War I and the modern Olympics movement, have affected China’s national development and Chinese interactions with the rest of the world. Professor Xu’s books in English include: Chinese and Americans: a shared history (2014), Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese workers and the Great War (2011), and China and the Great War (2011). Another book, Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 (2008), received an academic excellence award from Chinese Historians in the United States, and was chosen as the best book of 2008 by the International Society of Olympic Historians. He received the Best Output Prize for his book Strangers on the Western Front from HKU.

His research and findings have received global recognition, appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, South China Morning Post, and in other established newspapers and magazines. His 2017 Chinese-language academic memoir, Occasional Stories of a Marginal Man, is generating positive media attention on the Mainland and discussions among readers. He is currently updating the second edition of the book.