China is rich in products and has long been ahead of the world in ancient times.
In the late Qing Dynasty, China's national strength declined sharply and its power declined, but the European countries of the same period developed rapidly, so that from the mid-18th century onwards, many of China's foreign wars ended in failure. By the beginning of the 19th century, many countries realized that China was no longer able to protect its wealth and joined the ranks of dividing China.
By 1894, the Qing Dynasty was defeated in the Sino-Japanese War, and the Treaty of Maguan was signed with Japan, and the international status of the Qing Empire plummeted. The Western powers began to salivate over the fat meat of the Qing Empire. By the end of the 19th century, the Western powers set off a boom in the division of the Qing Empire. At the same time, as the war reparations deepened, the people were overwhelmed, and finally the Boxer Rebellion was triggered.
At this time, the Qing government was even more worried about internal and external troubles, unable to resist, so the Western powers were even more arrogant, and they took advantage of the fire and robbery in a vain attempt to swallow up the Qing Empire. Among them, the most famous is the "Eight-Power Alliance's War of Aggression against China."
The Eight-Power Alliance's invasion of China took place in 1900, which was the year of Gengzi in the Tiangandi Branch Chronicle, so historians also called this war the "Gengzi Incident". Among them, the eight countries refer to: Britain, Prussia (Germany), France, the United States, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With advanced military technology, the coalition forces have marched all the way.
They successively captured and forcibly settled in major ports such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Qingdao, Yantai, and Lushun. Immediately after that, they went all the way north, pointing directly to Tianjin, and for the allied attack, the Qing government sent troops mainly from the Boxers, the officers and men of the Green Battalion, and the Eight Banners of the Qing Dynasty to fight. The scene is very magnificent, and the two sides are inseparable for a while.
However, behind this seemingly generous and fierce battle of death, the achievements of the Qing soldiers were really shameful: in the face of the strong attack of the coalition forces, the Qing troops were defeated and retreated, Tianjin and Beijing fell in July and August, and Empress Dowager Cixi had no choice but to disguise herself and flee with important officials of the imperial court overnight, fleeing westward under the protection of some remnants of the defeated soldiers, and also called it the "Western Hunting" activity.
Afterwards, the supporters of the Qing government also explained this: the coalition army used the eight countries to deceive a country in China.
In fact, such an explanation simply does not stand. According to the battlefield diaries of the soldiers who participated in the war and the memoirs of the war published by later countries, until the fall of Beijing, the number of allied soldiers added up to about 16,000, while the Qing army had no less than 30,000 internal combatants alone. Among them, including the Wuwei Central Army, the Shenhu Battalion, the Shenji Battalion, the Manchu and Mongolian Pro-Japanese Army, and other units, this was still not the result of a large number of Boxers fighting on the periphery.
Of course, one thing that must be pointed out is that the battle between the two armies is not entirely based on the number of people, and it will also be affected in many aspects, such as the quality of combat members, the morale of the army, and the combat equipment. The Boxer Rebellion was a kind of non-governmental organization in the late Qing Dynasty, the Boxers worshipped the gods and possessed the body, believing that they could not enter the sword and gun, they used the slogan of "supporting the Qing Dynasty and destroying the foreigners", and they were evil everywhere in the people, but the short-sighted Empress Dowager Cixi praised them all, believing that the Boxers could save the decline of the Qing government.
Therefore, with the acquiescence and secret promotion of a cadre of officials led by Empress Dowager Cixi, the members of the Boxer Rebellion entered Beijing one after another. They built altars and burned incense and prayed everywhere in the capital, and for a time, the whole capital was in a state of mist and smoke. As for the Boxers' belief in Hong Jun's ancestors and Lishan's old mother, the common people were forced to accept them, and they were also required to worship them. If anyone questioned and denied the miraculous deeds of the Boxers, they would be severely retaliated against by the Boxers, or beaten, insulted, or even brutally killed, but the Qing government turned a blind eye to this situation, so that the people's hearts and minds were lost.
In order to maintain the authority brought by superstition, the Boxers have been focusing on destroying everything related to science, and for the railways and wires built by foreigners in China, the Boxers have always regarded them as evil things, believing that the reason why China is so weak is because of the existence of these "evil things", so when there is nothing to do on weekdays, they patrol around, demolishing railway tracks, cutting off wires and other behaviors abound. For those who had books written by foreigners in their homes, the Boxers also gave them the contemptuous title of "Ermaozi" and hunted them down. Unfortunately, this boxer rebellion, which was sacrificed for the people's will, did not bring much return to the Qing government.
Although Empress Dowager Cixi always had high hopes for the Boxers, it was difficult to win every time the Boxers fought with the allied forces. Every time a war began, the Boxers either rushed forward with large swords and spears, but they were vulnerable under the ferocious fire of the coalition forces, or they were frightened by the fire of the coalition forces, and the birds and beasts scattered. This boxer, powered by ignorance and fanaticism, was suddenly exposed in the face of reason and science, and in terms of its performance, it could not be more appropriate to describe it as "a ragtag crowd."
Compared with the boxers, the Qing government's green battalion and the eight banners of the army were slightly more formal.
After the lessons of the fiasco of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing government made up its mind to spend a lot of money to hire American and German instructors to train the regular army of the Qing government, and its training and organization methods were completely imitated from the West, and even the military uniforms were imitated in the style of German uniforms. This army was named the "Armed Guard Army" according to the organization, and the "Armed Guard Army" was divided into five armies: front, middle, rear, left and right, and each army was reorganized into more than 10,000 people, which was the strongest army in the Qing government at that time.
Before the Gengzi Incident, the strongest of the five armies, the Right Army of Wu Wei, was led by Yuan Shikai to Shandong to arrange a defense, the Left Army of Wu Wei was stationed in the Shanhaiguan area under the leadership of Song Qing, and the rest of the three armies were deployed along the Beijing-Tianjin Railway, and the five armies were at each other's horns. After the Gengzi Incident broke out, the regular army, with the help of the Boxers, officially sounded the clarion call of counterattack and led more than 10,000 Beijing city officials to attack the foreign embassy area where foreigners were stationed.
At this time, whether it is a front charge or a tunnel-digging sneak attack, a cannon strike or an arrow rain cover, all kinds of methods are exhaustive. After a month of fighting, there were corpses all over the periphery of foreign embassies, but the embassies were still unable to break through, and the flags of various countries were still not falling despite bullet marks. What was even more infuriating was that the combined strength of the embassies at that time was only more than a thousand, while the attacking side was as high as thirty thousand, not to mention the continuous reinforcements.
It can be said that in the case of numerical superiority, the Qing army failed to break through the coalition defense line, and the inability of its commanders was not an important reason.
After the defeat of the two Opium Wars, many people attributed the defeat of the Qing army to the strength of the enemy's military science and technology, so there was the emergence of the idea of "mastering the art of the division to control the yi", of which the "skill" refers to the advanced science and technology of the West, especially the military aspect. However, after the defeats in the previous wars, the Qing government had already spent a lot of money to buy a large amount of advanced military equipment from the West.
What is even more surprising is that during the Gengzi Incident, the Italian army had no choice but to return to Tianjin because of the ambush of the Qing army, but in an almost unguarded arsenal near Tianjin, they found a large number of guns, ammunition and combat supplies, it can be said that the advanced degree of these guns is even inferior to the Italian army. According to the later memoirs of the Italian officers of the war, we can find that:
"Most of the equipment discovered by the Italian army is the latest new products, of which a large number of equipment is more advanced than the equipment of the coalition forces, and there is no shortage of high-end munitions such as large-caliber cannons."
It can be seen from this that Li Hongzhang and others, who experienced the Sino-Japanese War, had already replaced and upgraded the Qing army's munitions, making it achieve a qualitative leap. Despite this, the Qing army was still beaten to no avail in front of the coalition forces, in the words of the commander of the coalition forces: the Qing army was obviously undertrained, its will to fight was weak, its morale was low, and its discipline was weak, even with the best equipment, it could not play its role.
From this point of view, although the Qing army has the advantage in numbers and equipment, it is just a group of walking dead, and in the final analysis, there is still a big difference in thinking between the two sides. The Western armies, which have undergone ideological enlightenment, believe in humanism, so when they fight, they fight for their own interests; on the other hand, in terms of the Qing army, they still stay at the level of feudal thinking, and even if they fight, they are slaves fighting for the main purpose.
When the two armies exchanged fire, one side was for itself, naturally doing its best, but the other side was dominated by slaves, driving slaves to compete with their masters, and the Qing army could not be defeated?
From this point of view, the long skills of Shi Yi are obviously not enough, we must not only have the long skills of Shi Yi, but also the ideas of Shi Yi, and later patriots must have also been aware of this problem, so there was a new culture advocated by Lu Xun, Li Dazhao and others. The spiritual outlook of a country stems from the spiritual outlook of the people, and to make a qualitative change in the personal outlook and overall quality of the people, the best practice is to take the national education as the starting point.
Resources:
["The Eight-Power Alliance's War of Aggression against China", "Shiyi Long Skill to Control Yi", the Qing Government signed the "Xinugu Treaty" with western powers]