Many people say that a series of policies of the Qing Dynasty caused China to lag behind the West, but also because the Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of the feudal dynasty, coupled with the fact that when the country was destroyed, the first time in history was bullied by foreigners, there was no temper, so many people permanently nailed the Qing Dynasty to the pillar of shame, believing that without the dark rule of the Qing Dynasty, China would always be a world power, and the economy would not be so backward. So is this really the case?
In my opinion, "freezing three feet is not a day's cold", and only attributing China's backwardness to the West is completely attributable to the Qing Dynasty, which is unfair to the Qing Dynasty. I think that the reason for China's backwardness in the West is caused by the feudal system, and if it is really attributed to which dynasty, it can be said that it is the result of the ming and qing dynasties operating together.
Most people think that the ghost method of "closing the country to the outside world" was pioneered by the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, but in fact, such a measure was already implemented during the Ming Dynasty. Before the Tumubao Incident, the large-scale black death in the West almost sent Europeans away, so all aspects of the economy were inferior to the Ming Dynasty, but the ideological seeds planted by the early Renaissance were already doomed to the rise of the West. After the Tumubao Incident, the Black Death in Europe also entered the end of the period, and the survivors began to build an advanced civilization under the blessing of humanistic ideas, and then look at the Chinese side, starting from the capture of the Emperor of Tumubao, the internal group competed for power and profit, and the emperors acted more strangely than one another, relying only on some able ministers to promote reform to stabilize the political situation at that time.
By the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty was hopeless because of the endless party struggle, the entire country was stagnant, and the people's livelihood was withered. The West has basically completed the transition from feudal society to capitalist society, giving birth to the company system, giving birth to new financial market prototypes such as stocks, and appearing in science and technology copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and other scientists who have opened up a new era. Militarily, China still respects cold weapons, while Western firearms are already an essential weapon for soldiers and are still evolving.
In fact, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, china has already emerged capitalist germ, but the Ming rulers, including the later Qing rulers, quickly snuffed out this germination in the cradle, vigorously propagating the feudal idea of divine right of kings.
Although the contrast between China and the West has been reversed during the Ming Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty has begun to lag behind the West, this gap is not very large, and for the fact that the gap between China and the West is constantly widening, the Qing Dynasty has an unshirkable responsibility. When the so-called "Kangqian prosperous era" was over, the West had already entered the era of the Industrial Revolution, and it would be even more intuitive to say that the Qianlong Emperor and Washington, the first president of the United States, were contemporaries. When the West was constantly emancipating its minds, China was vigorously pushing the literal prison and the eight strands of literature to imprison the people's thinking; when industry and commerce in the West were constantly developing, the Qing government was still emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce, advocating a small-scale peasant economy, closing off the country, and implementing the economic policy of "one-mouth trade" that harmed the country and the people.
In the middle and late Qing Dynasty, it can be said that the economy, system, and ideology have lagged behind the West in an all-round way, and the Chinese public is ignorant to what extent, after the first Opium War was fought, the Daoguang Emperor was actually still asking his courtiers where Britain was, and when he learned that the British king was a little girl in her twenties, he actually fantasized that a woman of such an age should be sent to the harem of the Qing Dynasty early, so as to avoid the Sino-British war.
It is said that backwardness will be beaten, and not accepting new ideas will only lead to more and more backwardness, and whoever sits on the throne of this emperor in the middle and late Qing Dynasty, whether it is the implementation of the new policy or the diligent administration, will not be able to save this crumbling dynasty. So that the last 50 years of the Qing Dynasty became 50 years of humiliation for China, fighting wars could not beat others, negotiations had no right to speak, and constantly cut land and compensation for a moment of peace. It is often said that "quantitative change causes qualitative change" and "thick accumulation and thin hair", perhaps during the Qianlong period, China was still a so-called world power, but the West caught up with China at a certain moment due to the accumulation in the early stage, but to say that China lagged behind the West, it was indeed the common responsibility of the Ming and Qing dynasties.