As we all know, the Sino-Japanese War was a very tragic war in modern history, the Qing court suffered huge losses and was forced to sign the Maguan Treaty, ceded to Japan and Taiwan, not to mention a large amount of indemnities, but 13 years ago in the Sino-Japanese War, in fact, a person known as the "Mother of the Beiyang Navy" had already proposed a trick, if it was adopted, it would be completely blinded by Japan.
In 1879, Japan annexed Ryukyu, and its wolf ambitions became apparent. This incident greatly shocked Li Hongzhang, who previously believed that the object of coastal defense was mainly to defend Against Japan, but also to defend Western countries, and after 1879, Li Hongzhang put Defense Day as the first place in China's coastal defense and no longer guarded against other countries. He wrote a letter to Li Fengbao, the minister in Britain, making this point very clear: "Since Japan has swallowed up Ryukyu, it has gradually snooped on Taiwan and Korea, and China must buy several ships of iron armor and plot to defeat the enemy." Here is the so-called enemy. It refers to Japan. Li Hongzhang has come to realize the fact that China and Japan are competing on the sea. In terms of coastal defense strategy, Li Hongzhang has transformed his slightly conservative defensive thinking from the original "land-based and fortified" to "water-based and war-based defense." But Li Hongzhang knew very well that he did not understand naval warfare, so he found a person to write the "Beiyang Naval Regulations", and that person was Xue Fucheng.
Xue Fucheng was born in Xiangmendi, but he had great contempt for the Four Books and Five Classics, and he had always been very keen on Western military science, and could be called the earliest batch of Western military experts in China. Xue Fucheng's strategic thinking on coastal defense was embodied in his "Statute of Discretionary Beiyang Sea Waterproof division" drafted in 1881. Like Li Hongzhang, Xue Fucheng used Japan as an imaginary enemy to design his own coastal defense strategy. His strategic thinking on coastal defense includes two aspects. The first is to block the inner ocean shipping lanes and prevent the enemy ships from going north. Xue Fucheng believes that China's coastal defense strategy should be designed according to the actual situation along China's coast, and the actual situation along China's coast is that some places along the coast have narrow roads and ships are not easy to pass. As long as we lay mines and set up troop ships in these places, the enemy ships cannot go north, and then the northern ocean can sit high. He believes that the islands north of Dengzhou are densely packed, from Changshan Island, Temple Island, and Beihuangcheng Island, and then from the north of Beilongcheng Island to the outside of Lushunkou, to Lushun Mountain and Haimao Island, the sea surface is no more than sixty miles wide, and the boats travel only a few places, and the boat passes through the rest of the place, often touching the reef. Therefore, after the Beiyang Navy is trained, it can send water troops to set up water villages here, carefully operated, and between the archipelagos, where ships can pass, lay mines, swing gunboats, and even set up floating forts to guard them, blocking the internal ocean shipping lanes, and preventing the enemy from going north. This move can be said to be very fierce, but it is effective, and the tragic self-sinking of China's ships in the future War of Resistance is also a copy of this move
The second is to advocate ''attacking as defending'.' Xue Fucheng said: "In case a strong enemy relies on the ling, then the forces of the north and the south can be fought, and if the easterners are not quiet, they should guard their mouths, and the three armies should draw their elites, and divide the way to Nagasaki, Yokohama, and Kobe.
He proposed that once war broke out between China and Japan, our navy would attack the coast of the Japanese mainland to save our maritime frontier, which was very insightful and the best combination of China's ancient thinking of encircling Wei and saving Zhao and the Western idea of blocking the enemy's coast. Thirteen years later, in the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Navy had long been trained, and some people re-proposed this view at that time, but unfortunately no one paid attention to it and no one implemented it, resulting in the defeat of the Chinese Navy to the Japanese Navy. If the Japanese elite were really operated in this way at that time, it was estimated that even if he did not die, he would be seriously injured, which showed Xue Fucheng's foresight.