"The Qing Dynasty is dead" is a satirical joke that young people love to use now. Young people use it to describe events, phenomena and ideas that are feudal and bizarre, and do not seem to occur in modern society. However, the current casual ridicule, more than a hundred years ago, was a real history, the blood and tears of the Chinese nation. Hundreds of years ago, the Manchu Qing entered the customs and seized the Ming Dynasty' Jiangshan.
At that time, the Manchu Qing dynasty was proud and the Eight Banners were also outstanding, but after hundreds of years of pampering and superiority, by the end of the Qing Dynasty, the so-called "Eight Flags Disciples" seemed to have become synonymous with idleness, leisure and bad work. The Eight Banners of the late Qing Dynasty may not have any money, but the pomp must be large enough; they must resolutely oppose any move that harms their immediate interests; and they have no sense of crisis at all about what they have done.
The Eight Banners of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the founding of the country, but those who have watched the Qing Palace drama, when they see the Qing Dynasty, it is difficult not to think of the Eight Flags. And under the influence of the Qing Palace drama, everyone has some concepts about the eight flags, even if they are not complete, they can say the yellow flag, the white flag, the yellow flag, and know that the emperor of the Qing Dynasty is always the yellow flag. For us, the "Eight Flags" is just a concept in the history books and a joke in the TV series, but for the Manchu Qing, the Eight Flags system was an important guarantee for them to seize the Jiangshan.
The Eight Banners, derived from the hunting organization of the Jurchens, became the social life and military organization form of the Flag People of the Qing Dynasty after Nurhaci rectified the organization, which can be said to be the fundamental system of the Qing Dynasty. In 1601, Nurhaci reorganized the organization and set up the yellow, white, red and blue flags; in 1615, the four flags of yellow, white, red and blue were added, officially establishing the eight flags system and continuing to be used until the fall of the Qing Dynasty.
These eight banners are civilians in peacetime and soldiers in wartime, and have extremely strong combat effectiveness. Before entering the customs, the Eight Banners were organized, disciplined, and combative, which formed a sharp contrast with the Ming army at that time, and it can be said that they seized the Jiangshan with overwhelming force and were important founding heroes. Therefore, at that time, the children of the Eight Banners, as the "important ministers" of the founding of the country, had a special status, and received or received special care for almost all generations. Even if the descendants of the Eight Banners are mediocre in talent, they can still rely on the shadow of their ancestors to enjoy official titles and receive a monthly money. After entering the customs, because of the reorganization and expansion of the Eight Flags system, the Eight Banners had sufficient military resources and spread throughout the country, and the Eight Banners played a major role in the conquest and suppression of the "San Francisco Rebellion", the wars against Xinjiang and Tibet, and the wars against Tsarist Russia.
It can be said that for a long period of time, the Eight Banners system has played an indelible and positive role in safeguarding national unity, developing and consolidating a multi-ethnic unified country, defending national territory, and preventing foreign aggression by stopping divisions and reclamation of the border areas at home, attacking colonization and recovering lost land externally.
However, by the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty was closed to the country, the Western powers were attacking, and the backward side of the Eight Flags system was becoming increasingly prominent: the Eight Flags disciples who had received special care for generations no longer had the courage and good war of their ancestors, most of them were idle and did not produce, and even occasionally some Eight Banners disciples who were willing to learn skills and support themselves would be coldly watched by other flag people. Obviously, the ultimate fate of such eight banner disciples is, of course, to be buried in the pile of historical paper together with the Manchu Qing Dynasty.
Of course, the Eight Banners soldiers who have been pampered and pampered, arrogant and lascivious, and who have really been on the battlefield can ride and shoot well, and are brave and good at war, but just like we often say that "the rich are not more than three generations", those Eight Banners disciples who rely on the shadow of their ancestors and are born to be pampered and treated well have long forgotten that the battlefield is cruel, it is not easy to fight the Jiangshan and defend the Jiangshan, and they are only concerned about whether the dignity of the "Eight Banners" is provoked.
According to the Eight Flags system of the Qing Dynasty, the children of the Eight Flags were not allowed to leave the flag casually, and the flag people in Beijing could not leave Beijing at will. Most of the descendants of the Eight Banners with outstanding merit have official titles that have been passed down from generation to generation, and ordinary flag people also have a share of money and food when they go to become soldiers. However, with the continuous reproduction of flag people, there are more and more flag people under the eight flag system, and even more than official positions are "not enough points", and the "monthly money" that everyone can receive has also been "diluted" by the growing population.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, many flag people can almost be described as "poor", but even if they have no money, these Eight Flags disciples are not willing to really use their own craftsmanship to earn an income. For the eight flags children, once they want to "support themselves" to work, it is "not out of breath" and they are coldly looked at by others. However, even if the Eight Flags disciples are poor, they still have a monthly income to receive, which has developed their bad character of idleness, leisure and bad work. Most of them walk the birds in the capital all day long, and after returning home, they smoke a few "big cigarettes", and they are a group of "rich N generations" who do not do good things.
To say that production, the Eight Flags children may not be able to do it, but when it comes to fun, the Eight Flags children can be said to be proficient in everything. For them, playing tea, raising thrushes, fighting crickets, flying kites are all basic operations, and whoever can come up with a new way to play will definitely be strongly praised by their partners. In addition, they also pursue "artistic life", singing, playing the piano, planting flowers, and teasing dogs are their necessities of life, and such an empty life has pushed them to the abyss of opium smoking, and eventually scattered the family wealth, and even stole the trees and stones in the ancestral graves to sell in exchange for tobacco money.
What is even more frightening is that even if the Eight Flags disciples are already poor enough to steal the things in the ancestral graves and sell them for money, they still pay great attention to pomp and circumstance. Outside, they always have a generous hand, otherwise they will feel humiliated, even if they smoke a lot, they will choose a high-grade smoke house and a high-quality big smoke, in short, everything can not lose face. From their point of view, what they try their best to maintain is the dignity, purity and elegance of the flag people.
In Lao She's eyes, they turned the cans of clams, pigeon whistles, and dried croquettes into culture, but they knew nothing about the world's major events. They don't know or care whether daqing is going to die, they only care about whether their monthly money can be received on time. Therefore, when the Reform and Reform Law required the Eight Banners disciples to "support themselves", they wept bitterly and kept "petitioning", demanding that the Restoration and Reform Law be abolished, and finally succeeded. This made Daqing lose the opportunity to save themselves, and the eight flags disciples also ushered in their own doom in such drunken dreams: the death of Daqing.
Taking history as a mirror, it can be seen that the Xingdi Eight Flags system brought the Manchu Qing into Guannei, and it was also the Eight Flags system that made the Manchu Qing eventually perish, so it can be seen that no matter how good things are, if they cannot keep pace with the times, they will inevitably lag behind the burden of the times. What we now call "eight flags" is already a pejorative term, and it does not refer to the young people who were brave and good at war when the Qing soldiers entered the customs, nor to the soldiers who defended their families and defended the land during the Battle of Yaksa, still less to the young people who gradually became working people and had self-reliance after the Xinhai Revolution, but to those decadent figures who were idle, lazy, and corrupt.
We cannot deny the Eight Flags system at all, because it has made great contributions to national reunification, because there are also people of insight like Lao She among the flag people, but we should at least understand why the former Xiao Yong will sink, because only by learning from history can we know the rise and fall. Obviously, this is because of the shadow of the ancestors and the idleness of the descendants caused by the "doting of the parents".
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, more than 200 years have passed since the ancestors laid the foundation of the country, and all the stories of Xiao Yong and good war have become a few lines in the history books, and the eight flags who have been preferentially treated have forgotten where this preferential appearance comes from. Therefore, we need to remember that if a person does not achieve success and preferential treatment by virtue of his true talents and hard work, then this "preferential treatment" is not necessarily a good thing.
This "preferential treatment" will make people only know to lie on the merit book of their ancestors and enjoy it, while forgetting that they should also work hard, which will eventually lead to the birth of lazy, arrogant and other bad qualities. In our traditional concept, we always feel that it is nothing for adults to suffer a little, after all, everything is for children. But this kind of thinking is likely to make the child eventually a hedonistic, non-struggle person, and in some ways, more likely to become a person like the "Eight Flags". Is this what parents want to see?
Therefore, in educating children on this point, perhaps we should learn something from the West. Of course, it is not to learn the "happy education" set, but to learn that they encourage children to do certain work to get paid. Parents in the East always feel that if they let their children do housework in exchange for pocket money, they will let their children develop the idea of money first, but this is not the case. Children in the East generally lack the concept of money, and now there are often children playing games to recharge tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of news, mostly because children do not know how hard adults make money.
And these ideas are cultivated from an early age. The bourgeoisie in the West did not give a large amount of property to its children quickly, but after establishing a correct view of money and values for them, encouraged them to engage in various jobs in exchange for remuneration, such as cutting grass, caring for children for neighbors, or selling lemonade made by themselves. This kind of education can let children know what they want to get, they must first pay, nothing can be simply obtained, children who are educated in this way can naturally learn to work hard, at least to a certain extent, to fight for what they want, rather than waiting for parents to pick the fruits of victory and send them to themselves.