46 years after the end of the Wanli War of Resistance against the Wo, the Ming Dynasty fell, and 18 years after the end of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Dynasty fell. For a country, this is all the end of the period, so why can the late Ming Dynasty win the war against Japan, but the Qing Dynasty cannot? That's what we're going to talk about today.
First of all, we have to admit that the Qing Dynasty is more decadent than the Ming Dynasty, but this decay is relative, the world facing the Qing Dynasty is a modernized world, when the second industrial revolution has been completed, mankind has entered the electric age, but the civilization of the Qing Dynasty is still a backward agricultural civilization, the foreign affairs movement has gained little, and the Qing Dynasty has not completed the necessary transformation. In the Ming Dynasty, in the overall environment of the world, the Ming Dynasty was not particularly backward. If we do not look at the background of their respective times, there is no difference in essence between the Qing Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty, their ideas are in the same vein, it is difficult to say how much progress the Qing Dynasty has made compared with the Ming Dynasty, and this backward agricultural and feudal thinking will be eliminated sooner or later.
From this point of view, in these two wars, the opponents japan faced were essentially one - both China, and at best the Qing Dynasty imported some foreign guns and cannons from foreigners. However, in the past few hundred years, Japan has undergone tremendous changes, which originated from the Black Ship Incident and the Meiji Restoration, and as a result, Japan has changed from an equally backward agricultural country to a new industrial country.
When an industrial country plays against an agricultural country, the winner or loser is clear at a glance. Since modern times, mankind has entered the industrial age or the era of hot weapons, and the most important factor to win is science and technology. In the era of cold weapons, after the two traditional agricultural countries met, the victory or defeat depended more on the number of participants on both sides of the belligerent, and the weapons were of secondary importance, because there was not much difference at all.
The essence of the defeat in the Sino-Japanese War was that agricultural civilization lost to industrial civilization, not China lost to Japan. The Opium War occurred in 1840, the Black Ship Incident occurred in 1853, the Japanese ship turned around, even if the transformation of the entire country was completed, while the Qing Dynasty mistakenly lost the opportunity to transform because of its deep-rooted tradition and huge size. The defeat of the Sino-Japanese War was inevitable for China, there was no room for recovery, and this defeat situation also appeared many times later, including the September 18 Incident, the Lugou Bridge Incident, the Battle of Songhu, etc., and this defeat lasted almost until the end of World War II. After the founding of New China, China also began to embark on the road of industrialization. When a small industrialized country meets a large industrialized country, Japan is downwind because of its size.