When it comes to modern times, many Chinese people must sigh and avoid talking, which is very understandable, because I was originally ahead of the world in 1800 years, and I was backward in modern times, and it is still very far behind. People who have watched the Opium War documentary know that everyone has muskets and cannons, and we are still big knives and spears, so even though Sun Tzu's Art of War is used as a "god-like" guide, all kinds of conspiracies and conspiracies have taken turns and used properly, and the absolute superiority of hundreds of thousands of people at every turn is still a miserable defeat in the face of loosely disciplined and thousands of Western foreigners.
Why did the Manchu Qing government, which dominated China at the time, lose so badly in the face of thousands of Western foreign gun teams? Many people will blame the decay of the Qing Dynasty, which is actually a misunderstanding.
First of all, although the Qing Dynasty was a political power established by ethnic minorities and was incompatible with the culture of the Central Plains, it was not known that the Qing Dynasty was an ethnic minority that had best learned Chinese civilization, and Emperor Shunzhi of the Qing Dynasty withstood the heavy pressure of the Manchu nobles and spared no effort to implement the policy of "Sinicization", unifying the salaries of Manchu and Han officials and setting up thirteen yamen in imitation of the Dynasty; Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty even rejected the proposal to transform the Central Plains into pastures and ordered that land should never be enclosed; Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty spent a lot of energy on the issue of the Manchu and Manchu families.
It is precisely because the Manchu Qing government worked hard to learn from the Civilization of the Central Plains and spared no effort to promote the integration and unification of all ethnic groups that the Manchu Qing government ruled in the Central Plains for 267 years, living with most of the Han Dynasty in the Central Plains, rather than rushing through the Yuan Dynasty (97 years).
Secondly, even if any dynasty is decayed, the ruler is still very sober about keeping the ancestral inheritance and never being the king of the country (of course, Liu Chan, who is frequently whitewashed by later generations, does not count). Therefore, most of the monarchs at the end of the dynasty chose to burn themselves on fire and hang themselves when the country was broken, such as the "dead end", as far as the King of Shang, as close as the Chongzhen Emperor, and died to the ancestors of the Emperor Mingzhi: Future generations swore to die not to be slaves to the country.
This is also very easy to understand, after all, the ancients ruled the country with filial piety, "the ancestors have merit and the ancestors have virtue", the ancestors founded the country, the merits are naturally great, and the task to be completed by future generations is to keep the foundation created by the "ancestors", how can they keep it? Virtue is good, so the most brain-burning problem for successive monarchs is how to be a monarch. If the foundation created by the predecessors is destroyed in their own hands and their tasks are not completed, how will they face the ancestors after a hundred years?
Therefore, to completely blame the Manchu Qing "people" level is one-sided. Therefore, I would like to say a word: stop obsessing over the subjective initiative of anyone, in the face of absolute strength, people are always small.
Since this is the case, the origin of Chinese civilization is so early, the creative ability of the Chinese people is so strong, and the four major inventions such as gunpowder and compass were invented as early as the Song Dynasty, why did China lag behind significantly in modern times? Use cold weapons such as primitive large knives and spears to fight against western hot weapons such as foreign guns and cannons?
In fact, before the rise of Western civilization, firearms in the early Ming Dynasty were already very developed. When Zhu Yuanzhang confronted Chen Youyi, Zhu Yuanzhang felt that hot things were a good weapon, so the red-hot iron rods, fire bolts, etc. were all used on the battlefield and played a key role in the victory of the war. When Zhu Di launched the "Battle of Jingnan", Zhu Di's northern army and Zhu Yunjiao's southern army used a large number of fire bolts.
When Zhu Di came to power, Yu Yongle obtained the Divine Machine Gun Technique in the fifth year of Yongle (1407) in addition to the Flat Cross Toe, so he specially set up the Divine Machine Camp to practice. Zhu Di then put forward the operational principle of "the divine machine is in front of the horse team and the horse team is behind" in the battle of the pro-conquest of Mobei, so the world-famous shenji battalion was born and became one of the three major battalions of the Beijing army (the other two battalions were the five military camps and the three thousand battalions), equipped with muskets, muskets, etc., and later added arquebus guns. The Divine Machine Battalion played an important role in cooperating with infantry and cavalry to make the application of firearms more professional.
The independent gun and artillery unit formation of the Shenji Battalion was in a leading position in China and even the rest of the world at that time, which was about a century earlier than the Spanish musketeers (founded in 1510) that became the first formation in Europe, which is a proof that the firearms troops in the early Ming Dynasty were ahead of the world.
This alone is evidenced by the fact that ancient Chinese firearms are more than 1,000 years ahead of the West.
Since firearms appeared a century before the West, why do we see low-grade goods such as large knives and spears in modern times when we are fighting against Western powers?
Speaking of which, I have to mention a heavy topic: Chinese civilization has dragged its feet.
Why?
As mentioned earlier, many people still adhere to this traditional concept: weapons are secondary in war, and the most critical is people. This is the most profound impression of Chinese civilization engraved in the minds of the Chinese people, "there is nothing difficult in the world, but I am afraid of people with hearts", "as long as people are well managed, everything else is not a matter."
"Manage people well", to put it bluntly, is how to "govern people".
At the beginning of the formation of Chinese civilization, an important problem was discovered: in the process of confrontation with nature, it was difficult for a single body to move and survive, and once it became a group, it could "make animals and animals and serve cunning insects", so in this process, the monarch and the monarch principle arose, and it was obstinately moving towards absolute monarchy.
Even Confucius, who advocated that "the people are noble and the king is light", resolutely supported the monarchy: "There are no two suns in the heavens, so there cannot be two kings in the world."
After the monarch was settled, more attention was paid to the "people", and from then on, the perspective of the Chinese nation was refocused on the people without hesitation.
It is precisely because Chinese civilization has been keen on "governing people" since ancient times, so since the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Confucians, Legalists, Famous Scholars, and Mo Families have all come to the country with a number of ideas for governing the country, although a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend, but their core goals are the same: how to "govern people"? How to achieve a perfect "rule by man" society?
Under the guidance of this kind of thinking of "governing people," scholars and readers throughout the ages have all taken "governing the country and ensuring national security" as their own responsibility, and even the imperial examinations with the characteristics of talent selection have also focused on the proposition of "how to govern people." As for the "small things" that cannot be elegant in developing weapons, improving firearms, and improving the level of weapons science and technology, no one cares, and when this good student of the Qing Dynasty came to power, how to "govern people" still needs to be studied hard, and the development of firearms is not worth mentioning.
Therefore, even though the shenji battalion, the earliest firearms formation unit in ancient China, founded in the early Ming Dynasty, was more than 1,000 years ahead of the world, the Chinese civilization, which has been keen on "governing people" since ancient times, still "resolutely" pulled people's perspective to the "people", resulting in the collapse of armaments and the backwardness of science and technology. In this way, has the Chinese civilization, which has been keen on "governing people" since ancient times, dragged its feet? Is it to take some responsibility for the fiasco of modern times to the West?