introduction:
During Qianlong's reign, the world has set off the wave of the first industrial revolution. Domestically, the economic model of the small peasant economy that had come from self-sufficiency was completely broken due to the troublemaking of a British businessman.
This British through the method of foreign trade, the cheap Western products into China, resulting in domestic handicraft products can not be sold, the trade deficit is huge, so that the country is losing money every year, a large amount of real money and silver outflow. As a result, Qianlong ordered the abolition of foreign trade activities at the three customs offices of Ningbo, Quanzhou and Songjiang.
Only one Guangzhou customs was left, allowing Westerners to trade a certain amount under the jurisdiction of the government, and later, fearing that Western merchants would continue to have an impact on the natural economic system of the Qing Dynasty and aggravate the anti-Qing sentiment of the people, qianlong issued a ban on the sea in 1757, requiring all customs points in the country to strictly implement this policy.
At this point, the closed country is really staged in China. This move prevented China from catching up with the wave of the Industrial Revolution, and China began to fall behind in the competition of national power between the East and the West. By 1840, the great powers of the East had finally been knocked on by imperialism with opium.
Since then, China has ended its isolation from the country, but such opening up has not brought progress, and since then it has begun a century-long history of modern humiliation. So why was the late Qing government willing to be backward and beaten? Signing the terms of mourning power and humiliating the country, pushing himself step by step to the end, and he was unwilling to take out the treasury's savings. What about buying advanced weapons and equipment to fight back?
The reason is actually very simple, because the government of the late Qing Dynasty was very corrupt, weak and incompetent, and extravagant. According to the "Biography of Zeng Guofan", when Zeng Guofan was a Qipinjing official, he only had 45 taels per year, plus some other income, but only about 135 taels. According to the purchasing power at that time, one or two pieces of silver in the late Qing Dynasty were equivalent to about two hundred yuan now. In other words, Zeng Guofan's annual salary is only about 27,000 yuan.
That's less than three thousand yuan a month. Although there will be some differences in the income of officials of different grades, the overall income level is still relatively low, and the daily expenses of officials are relatively large, in this case, officials have no choice, they can only start to embezzle and accept bribes. Scavenging intensified the corruption of the Qing government, and officials tasted the sweetness and intensified it, so that it became a "dead cycle" when it came and went.
In the late Qing Dynasty, it was very common to loot the people's fat and people's paste, and corruption was commonplace. There was even a blatant sale of official titles, that is, the sale of official positions. However, it is worth mentioning that Zeng Guofan was incorruptible all his life and never despised to collude with corrupt officials and corrupt officials.
When he was in charge of the Xiang Army, even if he had great power in his hands, he would never fill his own pockets. The excess military salaries were all paid, so Xiangjun's salary was much higher than that of other armies, so the soldiers loved him very much, which was also the fundamental reason why Xiangjun's combat effectiveness was far superior to other armies.
If we say that official corruption began because of the meager salary, we have to consider why the official's salary is so low. So was the Qing government really poor enough to withhold officials?
According to relevant historical records, after the end of the Opium War, the income of the late Qing Dynasty was not as low as imagined, but it could be said to be very high. The fiscal revenue has reached more than 420 million taels of silver, which is an astronomical number at any time, and this figure is even ten times that of the qing dynasty at its peak, when no Qing government in the world had money. So where is all this money spent?
First of all, the biggest expenditure of the Qing government was the reparations that needed to be compensated to the Western powers after the defeat of the "Opium War", which spent almost all of the financial revenue, and secondly, it was used to maintain the luxurious life of the royal family and nobles. The extravagance of the royal family began in the Qianlong period, when, with the prosperity of the economy, the wind of extravagance and corruption swept the whole country again, and Qianlong also took the lead in doing luxurious things, so the extravagant wind was out of control.
In the late Qing Dynasty, this custom reached its peak. One of the most representative figures must be Empress Dowager Cixi. In order to maintain such a life, she did not hesitate to embezzle the military funds of the Beiyang Navy, manufacture inferior guns and ammunition for the army, and use other money to repair the garden.
Even if the entire Beiyang Navy was completely destroyed in the Sino-Japanese War, she didn't seem to realize what evil she had done.
If this is the case for those in power, the officials and businessmen below will naturally not be good, and they will all compete to imitate and plunder the people to maintain their luxurious lives.
Zhumen wine smells of flesh, and the road has frozen bones, which truly describes the appearance of society in that era. It is precisely because of these decadent people and things that China almost faces the disaster of national subjugation, and the decay of the Qing Dynasty is worthy of future generations of police and supervision.
Shang Bing said history