As it is 11/11 Blood and Treasure has a nice post up on Chinese laborers along with a link with lots of great pics. B&T suggests that Chinese laborers in the War are getting more attention in Europe. There has actually been less written on actuall Chinese laborers than you might think, although of course there is a lot about the Chinese intellectuals who were in France for the war.
I wrote about the Chinese Labor Corps in my James Yen book, TO THE PEOPLE, for it was working with the CLC that Yen found his life work. This has been (to my unbiased mind) the best brief summary, but the CLC now is being given full treatment by Xu Guoqi, whose book OLYMPIC DREAMS (Harvard 2008) we noted here at Frog and whose book CHINA AND THE GREAT WAR (Cambridge University Press, 2005)opened up new ways of looking at China’s relations with the world.