Chinese seafarers were coerced into leaving UK after war, Home Office admits

Exclusive: secret deportations campaign, which separated families, was racially inflected, report says

Chinese seafarers with British wives and children were coerced" into boats leaving Liverpool after the second world war in a racially inflected" secret government programme, the Home Office has admitted.

After responding to calls to serve in the British merchant navy in the Battle of the Atlantic, about 2,000 Chinese seamen remained in Liverpool at the end of the war. They were subject to a secret Home Office campaign in 1945-46 to round up and ship them back east in the cargo holds of British ships.