In China's thousands of years of feudal rule, the Qing Dynasty, as the last feudal monarchical dynasty, has been criticized by posterity. This is not only due to the dissatisfaction accumulated by the people from Han to Manchu rulers. Throughout the historical context of China, Li Shimin of the Tang Dynasty also had Hu ancestry, not to mention the rule of the Mongols in the Yuan Dynasty.
So, what is it that makes the Qing Dynasty criticized by future generations? This goes back to the weakness of the Qing government towards the great powers.
It is precisely because of the weakness and incompetence of the Qing government that China's modern history has become a history of humiliation after a tribe. Those treaties that humiliated the country and asked the government to back down step by step made China a fat meat in the eyes of the great powers, allowing others to slaughter and humiliate.
Faced with such a Qing government, the great powers were able to press forward step by step in an attempt to turn China into their colony.
1. China is relatively rich in the minds of the great powers
Marco Polo once mentioned in his description of China: "China is full of gold, and everywhere is silver." "Although he arrived in China during the Yuan Dynasty, when China's territory was at its largest, the value of force was unprecedentedly strong.
Perhaps there is a clear exaggeration in its description of China, but it also shows china's wealth.
If gold and silver had been distributed equally among the people, there might not have been such exaggeration, but if wealth had been concentrated in the hands of a few people, or rulers of one family and one family, the amount would have been quite large.
And China is such a country with a feudal monarchy, as the saying goes:
"The whole world can not be the king's land, and the coast of the land can not be the king's subject."
"It can be seen that the level of rulers is high. Imperial power had a unique position in China at that time, so it became synonymous with wealth and became the object of choice of "robbers".
2. China's weapons level is backward
The so-called "political power comes out of the barrel of a gun" is really not vain. When a person, an organization, or a team has enough weapons to deter others, the enemy needs to weigh the gains and losses against them.
When the gains gained after winning are far from enough to compensate for the consumption and loss, under rational weighing, no one will take the risk of destroying the enemy.
China, on the other hand, after pursuing a closed-door strategy, has basically abandoned the development and improvement of firearms. As for whether the rulers felt that firearms were too dangerous, if they were spread out, they might affect their rule, but China's firearms gradually lagged behind from the world's advanced level and eventually became the object of ridicule of the great powers.
It's like a herd of sheep that originally lived carefree on the prairie, and had abundant and lush aquatic grasses to survive, but they didn't know when they were invaded by a pack of wolves.
Wolves have sharp fangs and claws, sheep only have grazing teeth, and even because there are no natural enemies for too long, even the horns have degenerated,
And what do you use to fight the wolves? It can only be slaughtered.
3. The wonderful psychology of the ruler
When they found that the great powers invaded like beasts of prey and could easily tear open the openings of the defense, the first reaction of the Qing rulers was not that we should strengthen the level of our weapons and strengthen the strength of national defense, but that as long as we gave the great powers enough money, we could let them leave, and as long as we left, we could treat it as if nothing had happened.
During the Opium War, the Qing government paid compensation and opened treaty ports. The rulers did not feel that these reparations were too large, they could completely count this money on the heads of the people, and the psychology of caring about compensation may not be as good as the shame of being asked for compensation by small countries that were originally despised.
However, once the bottom line cannot be held, it is like a collapsed ant nest, and what awaits the ruler is to invade more frequently. Gein already had models of being able to harvest more without paying, so the great powers followed suit.
Step by step, there was a war of aggression against China by the Eight-Power Alliance. Those treaties that humiliated the country have also become a historical necessity.
Under the oppression of the rulers, the people have no way to continue to survive, which leads to chaos and is also the law of China's historical inheritance and evolution.
The weakness of the Qing government's rule is also one of the ills of the rulers - they do not care about the living conditions of the people to which they belong.
"Ignorant of folk suffering"
Thus the connection with the people is even less close. This gave the great powers an opportunity to take advantage of it. Interests are tempting, in the face of the inability to form favorable resistance, the rise of bureaucratic capital, the upper ruling class and the cooperation reached by the great powers, the supreme ruler of the country to which they belong does not care about the people, the great powers can naturally press forward step by step to get more benefits.
Such a country with a vast land but weak and deceitful country has been used by the great powers as its own secret money bag, and has become the best place to dump goods and obtain profits. The wealth obtained from and dumped from the royal family can make them more capitalized and more confident to do whatever they want; so it is not surprising that the "barbarian and tough" "robbers" are pressing forward step by step.