China's feudal system lasted for thousands of years, until the eight powers opened the door of China with arbitrary means and the Qing Dynasty quickly collapsed. In just half a century, China has completed the process of integrating with modern times.
The decay of the Qing Dynasty is true, but if the great powers had not used warships and artillery to open the door of China, the peasant revolt alone would not have shaken the foundation of the Qing Dynasty.
Because in the late Qing Dynasty, they also had a foundation for their own decay, and people of insight like Kang Youwei and Li Hongzhang have also been looking for a suitable path to reform and try to save the Qing Dynasty from dying.
And it is worth mentioning that by the time Empress Longyu personally signed the abdication edict of the Qing Emperor, the Qing Dynasty still had a huge army of one million. Many people cannot understand why the Qing Dynasty, since it still has a million troops to fight, will be reduced to the result of only withdrawing from the stage of history. With a million troops in hand but no way to start, which one did the Qing Dynasty play?
The Eight Banners and the Green Battalion all embarked on the same deserted road
Let's first look at the composition of the Manchu Qing army, which is actually not complicated, and is basically divided into 4 types, the Eight Banner Army, the Green Battalion, the Yong Battalion and the New Army.
The Eight Banner Army is familiar to everyone, and it seems to have become synonymous with the Qing Dynasty army, which witnessed the rise and fall of the entire Qing Dynasty. At first, the Eight Flags were just a hunting organization of the Jurchens, but later Nurhaci began to pay attention to it, rectify and organize it, and the Eight Flags system began to be established. It was not until the Emperor Taiji period that the Eight Banners were truly perfected.
No one was optimistic about the Jurchens before the Eight Banners Army entered the pass, but it was with this army of 200,000 people that the Jurchens defeated the army of the Ming Dynasty and the peasant army of Li Zicheng, the king of the invasion, and finally chased the Central Plains and consolidated the rule of the Qing Dynasty.
The Eight Banners Army is stationed throughout the country and enjoys privileges in all aspects. But it was these privileges that made the eight flags disciples not think of making progress, began to decadent in military training, loved pleasure, and eventually indulged in gentle townships, completely losing their combat effectiveness.
In the late Qing Dynasty, many of the Eight Banners could not even ride horses, so in the Qing Dynasty' battles, it belonged to the Green Camp Army as the main force.
The Green Camp was initially organized by the ming dynasty's army and adopted by the Qing dynasty. Because the Qing Dynasty wanted to manage a Han chinese gathering place in Nuoda, it was far from enough to rely on 200,000 Eight Banner Army, so the Green Camp was extremely important.
The Green Battalion army was also stationed throughout the country, with a total of 600,000 troops at the beginning, reaching 800,000 at its peak. In the middle of the Qing Dynasty, the Green Camp was the elite division of the Qing Dynasty. But as time passed, they also embarked on the old path of the Eight Banners, and military affairs were full of corruption.
During the Jiaqing period, the Green Camp had been abolished, and even the suppression of a White Lotus Sect uprising was difficult. By the late Qing Dynasty, the Tongzhi Emperor had been weakening the Green Camp's forces. When Guangxu was in power, the Green Camp was changed from a standing army to a patrol battalion, and the era that belonged to them had passed.
It is said that when opium was introduced to China, many soldiers of the Green Battalion were infected with opium. The soldiers who defend the homeland are still like this, and it is really impossible to say that the Qing Dynasty will not perish. Whether it is the Eight Banners or the Green Battalion, they were all brave and good at fighting on the battlefield at the beginning. But in the end, because of the decay of the system and the "indisputable anger" of the soldiers themselves in the general environment, it eventually led to the decline of these two armies.
Second, the brave camp has become the mainstream, but the new army is the terminator
The stage of this history is all you singing and I appeared, and after the eight flags and the mud of the green camp could not support the wall, the brave camp appeared. The Yong Battalion had already appeared during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods, and initially appeared in response to peasant uprisings, but only a few local defense troops. Recruited in wartime, it was disbanded as soon as the battle was over, incomparable with regular armies such as the Eight Banners and the Green Battalion.
To put it simply, The Yongying camp is just a temporary worker, and the Green Camp and the Eight Flags are the real iron rice bowls. But if the iron rice bowls do not work, the temporary workers will be able to take up.
When Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang sought reforms, they created the Xiang Army and the Huai Army, which became indispensable forces for the Yongying Battalion. Subsequently, Zeng Guofan formulated a series of yongying systems, and the yongying also rose to become an important armed army in the late Qing Dynasty.
Zeng Guofan has been expanding the scale of the Yong Camp, and the Green Camp has also shown fatigue. Moreover, with the continuous reform of the system, the soldiers of the Yongying Camp themselves also fought for their anger, and they played the most important role in suppressing the White Lotus Sect Uprising and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Uprising. That is, after repeated qigong, the Yongying camp directly became the mainstream of the Qing Dynasty's military system.
It is worth mentioning that the situation of warlord division in the later Republic of China period was also caused by the system of brave camps. The yongying system also inspired another army of the Qing Dynasty, the New Army.
The Sino-Japanese War turned the reforms of Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang into a joke, and new reforms were imperative, and Zhang Zhidong began to train a new army.
This army is almost all learning from the great powers, whether it is from the army system, or the army equipment, training methods, etc., are copied from Germany and Japan, so this army is also called the new army.
The new army cut off all the pigtails, which is enough to see the Qing government's desire for reform. The number of the forces nouvelles is small, with towns as the unit, and there are more than 10,000 officers and men in each town. By 1905, there were 36 towns in the country, and the combat effectiveness was very strong.
But in the end, the new army will not be able to save the rotten foundation of the Qing Dynasty. By the time of the Wuchang uprising, the number of 36 towns had been sharply reduced to 26 towns, and the total number was less than 200,000.
Moreover, the first uprising of the Wuchang Uprising was the uprising of the new army, that is to say, the army that the Qing Dynasty originally used to make the last attempt eventually overthrew the Qing Dynasty.
The Forces nouvelles became tools to trample on the people, and the army left in Hong Kong lasted until the 1980s
At that time, when the Qing government built a new army, the person who trained the troops was Yuan Shikai, so later he naturally inherited the "legacy" of the Qing Dynasty, and the Beiyang New Army basically obeyed Yuan Shikai. After the Xinhai Revolution, Yuan Shikai stole the fruits of the revolution, and the Qing army became Yuan Shikai's puppet army.
It is said that it is a million troops in hand, but in fact the combat effectiveness is low, there are not many soldiers who can really fight in blood, and Yuan Shikai's Beiyang New Army is one of the few with great combat effectiveness. The rest of the army with average combat effectiveness collapsed in the chaotic era of the Republic of China, or became a policeman and no longer set foot on the battlefield.
It is worth mentioning that a Qing Dynasty army has been stationed in Kowloon City in Hong Kong. This army has been stationed in Hong Kong since the British occupied it. Saying that it is guarding the peace of the concession is actually a show, and there is no real power in essence.
Later, the Qing Dynasty collapsed, and the millions of troops scattered into the sky, but the Hong Kong Concession was very peaceful, and this army was retained, surviving in the Kowloon City Walled City, which had always had three irrespective zones. It was not until the end of the 1980s, after the kowloon wall was demolished, that the Qing army was disbanded.
From the entire military history of the Qing Dynasty, we can see that if we did not fight for qi and the system did not limit it, then the Eight Banner Army, which was once able to fight with one enemy and a hundred, could only be reduced to a disciple soldier.
And even if the Western military system is copied in an all-round way and an unprecedentedly powerful army is created, it will ultimately be impossible to save the foundation of decay. On the contrary, it can only plunge the country into a situation of warlord chaos, and let the army that once defended the country completely become a tool for trampling on the working people.
Text/Lamb
Reference: Why did the military reform in the late Qing Dynasty fail, Jiang Zhengwei