Count Alfred Graf Von Waltersee (1832-1904), commonly known in China as Wadesi. The second chief of the general staff of the German Empire, compared with his predecessor the great Silence Moltke and his successor, the great planner, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, was known in Germany as a political general, as his nickname "The Fox" illustrates. He is known to Chinese people that in his later years he served as the commander-in-chief of the eight-nation alliance. At the same time, a third-rate romance novel also increased his reputation.
It is said that when reporting to the German Emperor Wilhelm II, Wadesi, the leader of the Eight-Power Alliance, pointed out: "There is still potential vitality for the people of China. Neither the Western countries nor Japan have the power to rule this country (China) with a quarter of the world's population. Therefore, the proposal to divide China is indeed the next policy. Parliamentarians, diplomats and media from Britain, France, Austria and other countries all said: "The Boxer Rebellion can be used as a lesson for the future, so it is impossible to 'divide' China." ”
As we all know, from the nineteenth century onwards, China became weaker and weaker in its self-sufficiency, and western countries rose up on the hurricane of the Industrial Revolution. Under this circumstance, the once most powerful Qing state was reduced to a fat sheep to be slaughtered, and the great powers launched aggression against the weak China. Destroying and encroaching on China, making this vast land a colony, and gaining more long-term benefits from China is the ultimate goal of the great powers.
It can be said that in order to achieve this goal, in the next few decades, the great powers used their ships and cannons to pry open the teeth of the Manchu rulers, forcing the Qing court to sign a number of unequal treaties with various countries. From the initial Treaty of Nanjing and the Treaty of Tianjin to the later Treaty of Maguan, the great powers never gave up the encroachment on the cake of the Qing Dynasty, and plundered a large area of Chinese territory through both soft and hard methods.
Curiously, however, in 1901, the Qing court was forced to sign with eleven powers, the most humiliating, the most sovereign, and the largest amount of indemnities, but there was no content on the cession of land.
So why is this happening? Is it the great powers that intend to "catch big fish with a long line" in consideration of their long-term interests? Or did the invaders "discover" their conscience? Or did the great powers see the strong will of the Chinese people to resist? It can be said that these factors are all there, but they are not comprehensive. And this article explains why the Western powers did not write about the cession of land in the treaty when they drafted the Treaty of Xinugu.
Here, let's first talk about the rebellious sentiment of the Chinese people on the eve of the signing of the Xinugu Treaty.
In June 1900, naval commanders from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Austria, Russia, and Belgium gathered on the British warship HMS Hundred Men for a secret meeting. During the meeting, the representatives of the eight countries unanimously agreed: "Form a coalition army to encroach on China." "Because the strength of the coalition forces is far stronger than that of the Qing army, the great powers have great confidence in this war." What they care about is not the outcome of the war, but how much "windfall" they can reap after victory. As for whether the war can be won, the great powers are convinced that it will be a "very smooth march."
In order to gain more benefits, the commanders of the fleets of various countries showed a cunning face, and the British commander Seymour was a typical example. Under the pretext of "protecting the safety of foreign embassy personnel", Seymour led 2,000 allied troops to land on the tenth day of the same month and forcibly advanced westward. The target of the invaders was the city of Beijing, and they wanted to invade Beijing with lightning speed and divide up more interests. The rampant invaders shouted, claiming to be" dinner in the embassy in the capital." "So, was the war as smooth as the foreign aggressors had expected?
Regarding the specific process of this war of aggression, due to the length of the article, the author is not in a position to elaborate, but we still peeked at the leopard from the reports of foreign media at that time. Mitri, a war correspondent for Russia's New Frontier, witnessed the war and wrote his own observations into the "Eyewitness of the Eight-Nation Alliance". In this record, we can see the more detailed process of the "Battle of Langfang":
After arriving in Langfang, the British army led by Seymour and the officers and soldiers of the Qing Dynasty immediately went to war. At eight o'clock in the morning of the same day, the Qing cavalry, under the cover of infantry and artillery, quickly killed the station. However, the Russian sailors had long since assembled, and listed the formation of "queuing and shooting", and carried out several rounds of strafing of the cavalry attacking the station, suppressing the Qing army in place.
In order to turn the tide of the war, the Qing generals took a roundabout way, transferring the cavalry to a small village nearby and encircling the Eight-Nation Alliance from the right. However, Seymour had already arranged a German army on the right flank, and the Germans saw the encircled Qing horse team and immediately took turns shooting at it, once again blocking the Qing cavalry in place. As a last resort, the Qing generals could only order the infantry to engage the enemy head-on, and the Boxers also cooperated with the Qing army to launch an attack.
However, under the repeated shooting of Russia and Germany, the situation on the frontal battlefield was completely one-sided. The Qing army's marksmanship was very bad, their bullets hit too far, only caused a small amount of damage to the reserve of the Eight-Nation Alliance, and the casualties suffered by the Eight-Nation Alliance forwards were almost negligible. At one o'clock in the afternoon, the war ended in the defeat of the Qing army, but Seymour did not continue to march, but chose to retreat...
From this fact, it can be seen that although the Boxers and the Qing army could not defeat the coalition forces, their courage (especially the Boxers) who were not afraid of death still deterred the rampant invaders.
Of course, the Battle of Langfang is only a small microcosm of the entire war of aggression. At the same time, at the Dagukou Fort, Balitai, Laolongtou Railway Station, Zizhulin Concession, and other places, the Boxer boxers and patriotic officers and soldiers who defended their homeland left their lives behind and waged one bloody battle after another against the invaders. During this period, the Qing army commanders Luo Rongguang and Nie Shicheng were martyred in glory.
Although the combat effectiveness of the Eight-Power Alliance crushed the Chinese army in an all-round way, the tenacious Chinese still put the rulers in a dilemma. As the battle became more and more intense, the Boxers in Hebei, Shandong and other places went to Tianjin to resist the guns of the invaders with their flesh and blood. In addition to the Boxers, many patriotic people also participated in the war.
According to the records of the literature, the people of Bazhou, Hebei Province, actively resisted the invaders, and three hundred patriotic masses died in this war. The common people of the old city of Shulu County, even more with the attitude of treating death as a homecoming, fought hand-to-hand with the invading army, and more than 4,000 people were sacrificed. It can be said that the tenacious Chinese shattered the great dream of the invaders to divide China, and the commanders of the coalition army had to reconsider their strategy toward China.
Thus, the so-called "Dagu Declaration" was issued to dispel the doubts of the Chinese about "partition".
The resistance of the Chinese people has caused the great powers to abandon their intention to divide China, and if the strong resistance of the Chinese is taken as the internal cause, then the contradiction of interests between the great powers is an external cause.
According to the records of the attitudes of the various powers in the literature, many of their opinions are not unified, after all, each power is centered around the "interest" as the core, and the interests and goals between them will inevitably conflict. In the process of suppressing the Boxers, the invaders both colluded with each other and secretly conspired against each other. After the capture of the capital, the contradictions between the great powers finally intensified.
Since the founding of the Tsarist Russia, it has always been eyeing China's rich northeast region, and the Tsarist authorities have taken advantage of the opportunity of the coalition army's invasion of China to send troops to invade and occupy the three eastern provinces. However, the Russian authorities did not consider that this move would cause dissatisfaction among other powers, and the aggressive interests of Japan, Britain, and the United States were directly damaged, and the three countries immediately pointed the finger at Russia.
After the Russian army took action, the Japanese authorities immediately sent troops into Korea to clamp down on the Russian army. At the same time, Japanese diplomats were running around, actively seeking an anti-Russian alliance. Russia's power in China was growing, and the British felt unprecedentedly uneasy. For Britain, preventing Russia from continuing to invade northeast China was a top priority in its Policy in the Far East.
However, at this time, Britain had thrown its main force into the Anglo-Burmese War and had no spare strength to fight against Tsarist Russia. Therefore, Britain could only take another way to limit Tsarist Russia, that is, to co-opt Japan diplomatically and support Japan against Tsarist Russia.
Of course, in addition to the direct conflicts of interest, the opinions of the great powers on the selection of agents in China cannot be synchronized.
Whether Li Hongzhang can serve as a representative for the peace talks is a matter of constant debate among the various powers. When the Eight-Power Alliance was about to capture the capital, the Qing government entrusted all the burden to Li Hongzhang, giving him full authority to act as an agent for foreign affairs and negotiate with the great powers. The reactions of the great powers have been inconsistent. In order to gain the initiative in the negotiating arena and force the Qing government to recognize the legitimacy of the Russian invasion of northeast China, the Tsarist representatives recognized Li Hongzhang's qualifications as a representative and agreed to peace talks with China.
In order to gain dominance, Russia proposed that the troops of various countries withdraw from Beijing. However, the representative of Tsarist Russia, when he made this proposal, was immediately opposed by other powers except France. In order to prevent the Tsarist Russia from becoming dominant, Britain, Germany, and other countries held an opposing attitude toward Li Hongzhang's appointment as a parliamentarian and representative, and tried every means to prevent the Qing court from further negotiations with Tsarist Russia. In order to sabotage the peace talks, Britain, Germany and other countries put forward conditions that were difficult for the Qing court to accept, that is, the "culprit" of punishment - Cixi.
In such cases, the Great Powers must find a formula that satisfies all. The U.S. authorities were the architects of the "open door" policy, so the Americans always opposed the partition of China and advocated maintaining the status quo ante of the Qing Dynasty. With britain's note on "open doors", the situation in the negotiating arena has undergone a subtle change. In addition, Cixi has always flattered the great powers and said that she will do everything possible to please all countries. As a result, the various powers with ghost fetuses finally reached a consensus and negotiated peace with China without holding Cixi accountable.
To sum up, the great powers did not have ambitions to divide China at first, but the weakness of the Qing government gave them this opportunity. However, due to the Chinese tenacious side of the Chinese military and people in this anti-aggression war, coupled with the increasing contradictions between the great powers, the plan of "dividing up China" was aborted, and in the end, the great powers focused on the policy of "using China to control China". After that, the great powers decided to support the Chinese government as their agent to suppress the Chinese people.
Since then, using Chinese to subdue Chinese has become one of the usual tactics used by imperialism in invading China in the past hundred years. Until the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the great powers successively supported Yuan Shikai, local warlords, Chiang Kai-shek, Wang Jingwei's puppet regime and other forces to safeguard their own interests in China.
Although to this day, this strategic principle of "using China to control China" is still being implemented. Among them, the most obvious is that the capitalist countries headed by the United States do not support "separatism" on the Taiwan issue and do not express any clear attitude toward "China's reunification of Taiwan." In fact, their purpose is to use the Taiwan issue to contain China's development and to seek their country's strategic interests in the world.
Therefore, this is also one of the fundamental reasons for the long-term existence of the Taiwan issue in our country.
Resources:
["Xinugu Treaty", "The Policy of "Using China to Control China" by the Great Powers"