At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, our national strength was very strong, and even many small neighboring countries came to rely on us for help, and paid tribute every year to show friendship. However, in the middle and late Qing Dynasty, the Qing government began to gradually decline. Empress Dowager Cixi listened to the government and supported the puppet emperor, the government and the public were blindly arrogant, only looked at personal interests without considering the long-term development of the country, and implemented a policy of closing the country to the outside world, etc. These factors added up to the gradual decline and even collapse of the Qing Dynasty.
There were many famous figures during the Qing Dynasty, and Li Hongzhang was one of them. He was a famous minister at the end of the Qing Dynasty and one of the main leaders of the Foreign Affairs Movement, in addition to which he was also the founder and commander of the Huai Army and the Beiyang Marine Division, and he established China's first Western-style naval Beiyang Naval Division. But at the same time, he was also the one who signed the treaty of mourning and humiliating the country on behalf of the Qing government, for which he once said that what he hated most was when he signed his name.
In history, Li Hongzhang has been praised and deprecated differently, and some people say that he tried his best to safeguard the interests of the Qing Dynasty and tried to strengthen foreign affairs. As for the signing of unequal treaties, although he signed them as a representative of the Great Qing, he also argued on the basis of reason, but after all, the country's defeat was a fact, and the fault was in the Qing government and not in him, and he only did what he was ordered to do. In addition, he also has diplomatic deeds to defend the country. However, some people say that when he suppressed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, he killed too many people and avoided war and attached too much importance to coastal defense, and sacrificed the entire Xinjiang frontier defense. The merits and demerits of these are actually unclear and unclear.
But it is undeniable that Li Hongzhang is very talented and has vision. Before he died, he had warned his descendants that if China wanted to be strong, it must first destroy this country. History has answered this question, and that is Japan. Li Hongzhang knows that Japan is an ambitious country, and they are not satisfied with obtaining this little profit from the Qing Dynasty. But the Qing Dynasty could not do anything about it, after all, if it was defeated, it could only artificially knife me for fish meat. Later history also confirmed Li Hongzhang's concerns. Soon after the end of the Sino-Japanese War, Japan launched the Japanese war of aggression against China, a campaign that lasted for 14 years.