For the last twenty years, traditional diplomatic history in the West has suffered a major decline. However, international history as a new field has enjoyed widespread attention. Master historians such as Akira Iriye and Michael Hunt have used the international history approach to study US-East Asian relations. William C. Kirby of Harvard University has also emphasized the importance of internationalization, internalization, and externalization in Chinese foreign relations. However, until publication of Xu Guoqi's series of studies from prestigious Western university presses using the international history approach to examine China's major attempts at internationalization, there has been no major breakthrough in the “China-centered” international history of modern China. This essay uses the example of Xu ' s new book, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War, to analyze the key features of Xu ' s international history studies and their major contributions to the field. I pay special attention to Xu ' s skillful use of the new approach and of multi-archival research to present a fresh understanding of the impact of the Great War on China and China's contribution to the Great War through the perspective of Chinese laborers in France during the war.