When the dynasty prospers, the navy will be strong; The decline of the dynasty and the decline of the navy will also be from prosperity to decline, and this law has been fully verified in the Qing Dynasty. In the early Qing Dynasty, the central government paid more attention to the development of water divisions, and the water division also maintained a strong combat effectiveness, otherwise it would be impossible to win the battle against Zheng Chenggong's water army and then unify Taiwan, but since the Jiaqing Dynasty, the quality of water divisions has declined sharply, and it has gradually degenerated into an inland river and coastal patrol security force, completely losing the majesty of the original sea.
The policy of locking the country did not originate in the Qing Dynasty, and from the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the imperial court explicitly banned the sea. The Qing Dynasty continued and strengthened this policy only for reasons such as guarding against Zheng Chenggong, and at the same time, in order to facilitate the inspection of sailors, the state also controlled the high speed of civilian ships. They objectively hindered the renewal and progress of naval technology, and in the two hundred years after the Sino-Japanese Luliang Naval War, the marine division not only did not develop, but even the past scale could not be maintained.
When the Chinese navy did not advance or retreat, withdrawing from the ranks of first-class navies, the speed and pace of development of the world's navies accelerated sharply. In the nineteenth century, with the wave of the industrial revolution, the performance of warships in Western navies has taken a qualitative leap compared with the past, and wooden sails have gradually been replaced by steam iron ships, which has enabled European countries to take the lead in bidding farewell to the era of paddle sails and stepping into the era of steam armored ships.
In the nineteenth year of the Qing Dynasty, that is, in 1839 AD, the British army invaded China from the sea and provoked the First Opium War. At this time, Britain was the world's first maritime power, and some of the warships put into the war by the British Navy were the most advanced steam armored ships at that time, and the guns equipped on British ships were powerful and had a long range, up to one with seventy-four guns, and an effective range of one thousand to two kilometers. The patrol warships of the Qing Army Marine Division were mostly low-quality sloop boats, "thin plates and old nails, broken when hit", the firepower was also very poor, the general warships only had two to four guns, and the shells were basically solid projectiles, and the power was limited. In the battle, although the warships of the Qing naval division had hit the British ships many times, they had never been able to sink any of the enemy's regular warships.
On the one hand, the British army opened the closed door of China with the help of its ship cannons, causing a huge shock to Chinese society, which was called "a disaster that has not occurred in three thousand years" or "a major change in ancient and modern times"; on the other hand, Chinese has since known what is the modern navy and the gap between its own navy and the world's advanced level, if the whole country can be like Japan, which was defeated by the Tang army, it will be ashamed and courageous, and it will be used in accordance with it. It is entirely possible to turn great harm into great profit and use it as a great opportunity to reform and revitalize its own navy.
Change takes time, and after the end of the First Opium War, China was given a period of opportunity for more than a decade. In the past decade, naval weapons around the world have been further upgraded, most of the wooden-hulled warships have been replaced by iron ships using steam power and propeller technology, and the guns equipped on the ship have also changed from smoothbore guns to longer range and higher precision rifled guns. In the meantime, although Lin Zexu, Wei Yuan, and others put forward the slogan and proposition of "Shiyi long skills to control Yi", and suggested imitating western ships and creating a new type of navy, the "Shiyi" at the national level was not able to put into action, it can be said that nothing can be done, everything is as old, the gap between the already existing and the West has widened, and the good time of more than ten years has been wasted in vain.
Wasting the opportunities that history has given us is bound to be punished. In the sixth year of Qing Xianfeng, that is, in 1856 AD, Britain and France launched the Second Opium War. During the First Opium War, the British Navy's fleet consisted mainly of sail ships, and steam ships were only a part of them, but in this war, they were all replaced by steam ships, and sail ships were basically eliminated.
In the face of the fierce offensive of the enemy ships, the Qing army's marine division and the army on the shore could not even talk about the merits of fighting, and the fleets of the Anglo-French coalition could not only cruise at will in the mouth of the Chinese sea, but even go deep into the inland river without anyone else. Following the First Opium War, the Qing court was forced to sign another alliance with Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. After this strong stimulus, both the government and the public were greatly shaken, and from Prince Gong Yixuan, Wen Xiang, and other central powers-that-be, to Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang, and other local powerful factions that held real power, they all decided to launch a foreign affairs movement, and Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan's "Shiyi" thinking was able to move from theory to practice.
History has once again generously given China the opportunity and time to develop its navy, this time longer, for thirty years! Thankfully, policymakers have followed the tide of history and largely seized the opportunity, without the chest-pounding and sighing situation of the past. After active efforts, in 1871, the first modern Chinese navy, the Fujian-Zhejiang Naval Division (that is, the Fujian Navy), was established, and later the Beiyang Navy and the Nanyang Navy were established. By 1884, the initial Sanyo Navy had a total of 43 ships, with a total tonnage of more than 42,000 tons, which was at the middle and upper levels compared with European countries in terms of tonnage.
The problem is that the new thirty years will not only have opportunities, but also challenges. In August 1884, the Fujian Navy was attacked by the French Far East Fleet at Mawei Port in Fujian Province. France's naval power was second only to that of Britain, and the armored cruiser Triumph was four thousand tons, and the other ships were mostly in the two thousand to three thousand tons class. Although the strength of the Fujian Navy ranks first in the Sanyo Navy, most of them are small gunboats, and even the flagship "Yangwu" is less than 2,000 tons.
The total annihilation of the Fujian Navy in the Mawei War was a serious warning of China's existing naval development model. As far as the current situation was concerned, the Sanyo Navy was a system of its own, the command could not be unified, it was easy to be broken by the enemy countries, and the strength of the individual separation was even weaker: the Beiyang Navy was not yet as weak as the Fujian Navy, and only had the flagship "Chao Yong" and the sister ship "Yang Wei" two fast ships, which were only more than 1,300 tons, and it was a wooden structure with an outsourced steel plate, and its defense capability was very weak; The Nanyang Navy is slightly better than the Beiyang Navy, but it is not much stronger, and it cannot be expected to play much of a role in foreign defense.
Faced with this situation, the central government learned its lesson and decided to take back the unified command of the navy, so in October 1885, it established the Navy Yamen. After the establishment of the Navy Yamen, the actual power was in the hands of Li Hongzhang, who used the name of the Navy Yamen to "rectify coastal defense" to give priority to the development of the Beiyang Navy, thus pushing the construction of the Beiyang Navy to the highest peak.
From 1885 to 1888, in the four years, the Beiyang Navy added a total of fourteen new ships, most of which were purchased from Britain and Germany, except for a few self-built, including two ironclad ships, five fast ships, and a torpedo boat, which made the Beiyang Navy improve both in quantity and quality of equipment. By September 1889, the Beiyang Fleet was officially formed, and at this time it had nearly fifty large and small ships, with a total tonnage of about 50,000 tons, and its strength ranked first in the Far East, which was admired by all countries.
The challenges encountered by the Chinese navy during this period were not only the Western powers, but also the eastern neighbors of Japan. Although the former has existed for a long time, with the passage of time, the powers of the countries involved in the Far East have gradually formed checks and balances in the competition with each other, and the latter has begun to become the most important threat to China.
Thirty years of development opportunities are equal for all countries in East Asia. In the late 1860s, taking advantage of the relative stability of the Far East, Japan launched the Meiji Restoration, and also learned from the West, and began to develop a modern navy, which invisibly launched an arms race between China and Japan.
For the first two decades, China was ahead of Japan. By the time the Beiyang Fleet was formed, Japan had only seventeen warships, and only five warships of two thousand tons or more capable of combat, a total of less than fifteen thousand tons, and three of them were relatively old and slow. The Beiyang Fleet has seven warships of more than 2,000 tons, a total of more than 27,000 tons, almost twice that of Japan, especially the two 7,000-ton ironclad ships of "Dingyuan" and "Zhenyuan", which are unprecedented in the Japanese Navy, and the Japanese are afraid of "more than the tiger and leopard".
With the opponent already thrown off the boss, There has been a clear arrogance in China's military and political circles. Li Hongzhang was attacked and constrained by all sides in the use of naval funds, and many people believed that the Beiyang Navy was already strong and could sit back and relax, and there was no need to invest any more, and they accused Li Hongzhang of continuing to buy ironclad ships for being too expensive, and several times "the huge sums of money in the southeast were thrown to the outside world."
Compared with the era of paddle sails, the investment in the era of steam armored ships is indeed amazing, and it has shown a trend of soaring year by year. In 1861, even if China wanted to buy an entire small fleet, it only needed to spend one and a half million taels of silver, but by the 1980s, this money was not enough to buy an ironclad ship - just a 7,300-ton ironclad ship cost more than one hundred and eighty taels!
The two ironclad ships of the Beiyang Fleet plus the new clipper ship "Jiyuan" at the cost of four million taels of silver, this fund can not be taken out by the state, it is temporarily raised by many parties, in addition to the coastal defense funds, there are also loans paid by the Steamship Merchants Bureau, donations from salt merchants in southern Anhui, and so on.
Both China and Japan originally lacked the primitive accumulation of capital, and it was indeed difficult to develop a modern navy, but no matter how difficult it was, as long as there was determination and courage, they could always come up with a way. In order to expand the navy, the Japanese government issued huge public bonds, and Emperor Muhito even saved the cost of the palace and allocated internal funds for shipbuilding. After 1888, Japan added an average of two new ships per year, and the Japanese Navy also aimed to defeat "Dingyuan" and "Zhenyuan", and specially customized the 4,000-ton ironclad ships "Hashidate", "Matsushima" and "Itsukushima", known as "Three Kingships", and the gun caliber and speed of the three ships exceeded those of "Dingyuan" and "Zhenyuan".
China is the complete opposite, after the Beiyang Fleet was formed, the central government decided to stop adding new ships, and did not allow the ship to update its equipment. In order to curry favor with Empress Dowager Cixi, the prime minister of naval affairs, YiZhen took the opportunity to embezzle naval funds to overhaul the Summer Palace, according to incomplete statistics, this amount is at least 20 million and more, if it is used to buy such an ironclad ship as "Dingyuan", you can buy eleven, and use it to buy a new type of fast ship like "Zhiyuan", you can buy twenty-four!
The outside world may not be able to figure out why the day when the Beiyang Fleet became an army has become a time when its development has stopped. After 1888, the Beiyang Navy neither purchased a new ship nor updated a single gun, nor was the ammunition qualified. In the subsequent naval battles, many enemy warships were hit by bullets, and even shells passed through the iron armor and fell into the machine compartment, but none of them exploded and sank, which shows how bad the ammunition of the Beiyang Navy has become.
In the decade before the end of the great limit, the Chinese and Japanese navies are like the two protagonists in the fabled tortoise and rabbit race, one of them slept in the middle of the way and lost the great advantage that was already in his hands, and the other was able to catch up in the protracted and unremitting counterattack and comprehensively overtake.
The Sino-Japanese War, which broke out in 1894, was a typical "naval victory" war in the modern history of the world, and it was also the best test of the achievements of the thirty-year period of opportunity between China and Japan. The Beiyang Fleet was initially defeated by Toshima in the war, then in the Yellow Sea, and finally the entire army was destroyed at Liugong Island in Weihai, thus completely forging China's great defeat in the Sino-Japanese War.
The defeat of Jia Wu caused great shock to the psychology of the Chinese people. Since the First Opium War, although China was almost defeated at sea, its opponents were European naval powers such as Britain and France, and even if Japan was regarded as an imaginary enemy, it was still a "small state" in people's minds at that time.
Thinking about how prosperous the Beiyang Navy garrisoned Liugong Island, which was called the crown of East Asia, looked so prosperous that in the blink of an eye, the Beiyang Naval Garrison, which was called the crown of East Asia, looked so prosperous that in the blink of an eye, the trees and trees were destroyed, leaving only the miserable scene of "the old fortress xiao killed the big trees withering, and the high ya still looked down on the cold tide." This result shows that China has not really been able to seize the opportunity in the previous three decades, and the huge hard work and efforts that many people of insight have put into creating a navy have been completely wasted.
After the Sino-Japanese War, although the central government had the idea of reorganizing the navy, it was estimated that the start-up fund alone would need 18 million taels, and the annual fund would be 2 million taels. Of course, if this huge amount of money is compared with the reparations for the first and lower centuries, it is not less than a fraction of the latter, and if the government and the public have the determination to work hard and taste the guts, it is not impossible to do it, so the key is not this, but after China has repeatedly missed the rare historical opportunity of a hundred years, the excellent environment and conditions for developing the navy have gone forever!
From 1897 to 1898, the great powers set off a frenzy to divide China's military ports, and the important harbors along China's coast were completely occupied, and a naval anchorage could not be found. In 1900, the Eight-Power Coalition invaded Beijing and Tianjin, and six ships that China had just purchased from overseas were plundered by the Coalition Forces, which made the process of rebuilding the navy even worse.
While the reconstruction of the Chinese navy was basically at a standstill, the navies of the great powers were making rapid progress, and the number and tonnage of warships were increasing exponentially. As the victor of the Sino-Japanese War, China's old enemy Japan with the goal of "dominating the Orient", hundreds of millions of yuan in reparations from China were mostly used by them to expand armaments and develop the navy, by 1900, according to the size of the fleet and the total tonnage, Japan has ranked sixth in the world, second only to Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Germany. In 1904, the Japanese Combined Fleet defeated the third-ranked Russian Pacific Fleet in the Battle of Tsushima, and the Japanese Navy also jumped from the second camp to the first camp with this battle, becoming a naval power in the Pacific.
It was not until 1909, benefiting from political reform movements such as the preparation of the constitution, that the Qing government faced the stagnation of the navy and made the decision to revitalize the navy. In February of that year, the central government set up the Preparatory Office for Naval Affairs and formulated a seven-year plan for the development of the Navy, according to the plan, from 1909 to 1915, the state will build eight first-class warships and more than twenty cruisers of each class for a seven-year limit.
Soon after the implementation of the "Seven-Year Plan," it was interrupted by the gunfire of the Wuchang Uprising, but in fact, even if the Wuchang Uprising did not occur, it would be impossible to realize the "Seven-Year Plan" due to changes in the internal and external situations and the constraints of various conditions.
For a country, historical opportunities do not always exist. Since the beginning of the First Opium War, China has twice been given the opportunity to develop its navy and build it up, but it has either missed it or has not really seized it, and it is too late to regret it when the opportunity is lost and then wants to chase it.