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In the past, when I looked at the history of the Opium War, I was often confused by a question. The British army and navy traveled far and wide to attack China's coastal cities with only a few thousand mobile troops, while the Qing Dynasty not only had the advantage of fighting at home, but also had a huge population base and an army of up to 800,000 people (200,000 Eight Banners and 600,000 Green Battalions).
According to common sense, even if there is a gap between the two sides in terms of command level and weapon quality, it will not end in a crushing defeat for the Qing army in every battle. However, the actual situation is that the Qing army is not only repeatedly at a disadvantage, but also almost the same as the British army in terms of troop investment. For example, in some battles along the coasts of Zhejiang and Guangdong, the Qing army could only draw out a few thousand troops to fight at one time. If we look at the composition of the troops, they were all temporarily requisitioned from the inland provinces, and even included the elderly and children.
Why did the Manchurian clique, which had risen between the white mountains and black waters, and with less than 10,000 troops, inflicted heavy losses on the Ming Dynasty's elite generals several times its own, have such a huge contrast in military mobilization? Li Hongzhang, an important minister in the late Qing Dynasty, was deeply touched by the changes of the times in the Qing Dynasty's military mobilization capability, and once said:
"The previous generation used more soldiers but less salary, and our dynasty used fewer soldiers and paid more. ”
This means that the Ming Dynasty was much stronger than the Qing Dynasty in terms of military mobilization, not only did it mobilize a large number of troops at one time, but it also spent less money than the Qing Dynasty. In other words, is the Qing Dynasty's military mobilization capability really inferior to that of the Ming Dynasty?
To answer this question, we must first look at the specific historical situation faced by the two dynasties.
The military mobilization capacity of the Qing Dynasty
Is it really inferior to its predecessors?
The Prussian military theorist Clausewitz (1780-1831) once said that "military is an extension of politics", and the level of a country's military mobilization ability is rooted in its internal and foreign affairs.
Let's talk about the dynasty first, we have the impression that every time the Ming Dynasty fights a big battle, it can come up with a considerable number of troops. For example, in the Battle of Tumubao, the Ming army claimed to be 500,000, but in fact it took out about 200,000 troops. There were more than 100,000 army and navy before and after the Wanli Aid Korea Campaign. After the rise of the Jurchen tribe led by Nurhachi, the Ming court sent troops to kill, and the troops marched in four ways, and there were 100,000 together, as for the Songjin Battle that finally staked the national fortune of the Ming Dynasty, the field corps under the command of Hong Chengchou, the governor of Ming Jiliao, also had a total of 130,000, not counting the Zu Dashou army in the stronghold of Liaodong. Therefore, there should be no objection to the large amount of troops mobilized by the Ming Dynasty.
Looking at the Qing Dynasty again, judging from Nurhachi's mobilization before the Battle of Sarhu, the Jianzhou Jurchen was emerging at that time, and the population base that Nurhachi could control was small, and the Mongol tribes had not yet fully joined at this time, so the number of troops that Manchuria took out at one time could only compete with the Ming army on the one road, which was also the fundamental reason why Nurhachi would choose to concentrate his forces to eat one of the four Ming armies first.
After the Qing army entered the customs, the number of the Eight Banners Army, as the "national capital", was fixed at around 200,000. It seems that the number of troops is not small, but the deployment arrangement of the Qing Dynasty made the number of 200,000 instantly much thinner.
According to the principle of centralizing power over control, a little more than half of the 200,000 soldiers of the Eight Banners had to be stationed in Beijing, and the rest were assigned to various passes and passes in the localities.
China's territory is so large that the average 100,000 people lose their military significance. For example, shortly after the Taiping Rebellion, the Taiping army descended the Yangtze River to conquer Nanjing, the center of wealth in the southeast. Nanjing was the capital of the Ming Dynasty and the economic center of the entire southern region at that time, and it was of great significance in all aspects, and the Eight Banners soldiers stationed in Nanjing and their dependents were only 20,000 people, and more importantly, in the face of Hong Xiuquan and Yang Xiuqing's troops, these 20,000 people had almost no ability to resist, or these 20,000 people did not resist at all. Therefore, the total number of troops in the Eight Banners is not large, and its military significance should not be overestimated.
If Nanjing is located in the interior, there is no need for war, and there is no need to station too many troops, then the Qing Dynasty can take out the number of troops in the border areas is far inferior to the Ming Dynasty. In order to win this decisive battle, Qianlong not only mobilized the Beijing division and the garrison of Shaanxi and Gansu provinces to defend the Eight Banners, but also transferred the Sauron soldiers from the northeast, and the Chahar banner soldiers from southern Mongolia, together with the front line and the green battalion troops from other provinces of the country, a total of two large armies, together with only more than 20,000 people. According to Mao Haijian's relevant statistics in the book "The Collapse of the Celestial Empire", the Qing Dynasty transferred troops from 7 provinces to support Guangdong in the Opium War, with a total of only about 17,000 people, while the 20,000 reinforcements Zhejiang received in the first Opium War came from 12 provinces.
Therefore, purely looking at the quantitative comparison, the military mobilization capacity of the Qing Dynasty is indeed inferior to that of the Ming Dynasty, and Li Hongzhang's evaluation is half right. But to say that the Qing Dynasty spent more money on military mobilization than the Ming Dynasty and it was not cost-effective, it would not be objective.
The different internal and external situations of the Ming and Qing dynasties
Let's start with the Ming Dynasty, which was a dynasty that paid great attention to the distinction between Huayi and Yi. On the military level, it was manifested in the fact that the Ming emperor focused his defense on Mongolia in the north. The Mongol threat at that time was not small, but it was not enough to threaten the survival of the Ming Dynasty. Because the Mongol tribes were divided and contradictory, although the Ming army in the Battle of Tumubao suffered a rout, and Ming Yingzong was also reduced to a prisoner, but its national foundation was not hit by the bones.
The real threat to the Ming Dynasty was during the Wanli Dynasty and beyond, which was also the time when the money was spent the most. During this period, Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea with the strength of the whole country, which was precisely entangled with the Ming Dynasty's suppression of rebellions in Ningxia and Guizhou and other regions, and the finances were almost dragged down, and then the Ming Dynasty's national strength has not recovered, and it encountered the rise of Nurhachi in the northeast, and the Ming army was severely damaged by more than 100,000 people in the battle of Salhu.
In this situation, the Ming Dynasty fell into a dead cycle of military mobilization. Whenever there was a military fiasco, the first thing the Ming court thought of was to increase the intensity of tax collection and extract from the peasants, the most typical of which was "Liao Salary", "Suppression Salary" and "Training Salary". The expenses of the three heads each have more than 3 million taels of silver, which is equivalent to the actual income of the Wanli Dynasty in a year (about 4 million taels), and the sum of these three is tens of millions. Ironically, these are not counting the selfish levies of the Ming emperor and the eunuchs. Therefore, the Qing Dynasty did spend a lot of money to mobilize the army, but the "previous generation" in Li Hongzhang's mouth is not necessarily superior. On the contrary, it was precisely because the Ming Dynasty was "too willing to spend money" in military mobilization and lacked restraint and detailed planning that people like Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong raised their arms and instantly received hundreds of thousands of hungry people, and the Ming Dynasty also fell because of its own excessive exploitation of the peasants' financial resources.
Next, look at the Qing Dynasty, it is true that the Qing Dynasty spent a lot of money on soldiers, and the Yongzheng Dynasty used troops against the Dzungar Department, and the savings of 50 million taels of silver basically bottomed out. Twenty years later, Qianlong planned to use troops on a large scale in the northwest, and it was also because he knew that there were 30 million taels of silver in the treasury in savings, so he dared to let go of the game. It can be seen that the Qing emperors were relatively cautious in comparison to the Ming Dynasty's use of overdraft of socio-economic potential to cope with military expenditures, and knew how to stop when they found that their financial operations were on the verge of collapse. For example, although Emperor Yongzheng's military command was not high, and Fu Erdan and Marseille and others lost the battle, the emperor did not levy a large amount of taxes to expand the war like his predecessors, but decisively pressed the pause button on the northwest battlefield.
Unlike the Ming Dynasty, which arbitrarily apportioned military expenses to the people, the Qing emperors adopted the practice of protecting the people's power from the perspective of the policy itself. For example, 51 years after Kangxi's reign, he determined the policy of "adding Ding in a prosperous era and never increasing the endowment" and fixed the poll tax. The Yongzheng Dynasty implemented the policy of "apportioning the land into the mu", pursued fairness in the tax policy, and prevented the oppression of the poor from being too deep, and these measures inevitably deviated in actual implementation, but they did play a buffering role to avoid letting the burden of military expenditure fall directly on the heads of the people like the Ming Dynasty.
There is a more important reason for the large military expenditure of the Qing Dynasty, that is, the actual territory of the Qing Dynasty far exceeded that of the Ming Dynasty, the defensive frontage was expanded, and the supply lines were also lengthened, which were all new problems that the Ming Dynasty had not encountered. For example, Qianlong sent Wu Ya Zhaohui, the general of the expedition to the west, to return to Xinjiang, but most of the way was desert and the Gobi Desert, and there was no way to talk about local supplies, so the logistics cost was naturally much more. In the middle and late Qianlong Dynasty, the Qing army fought expeditions to the Gorkhas, fighting on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and fighting against Burma in the mountains of subtropical rainforests. It is also reasonable that the Qing court used fewer troops than the Ming Dynasty. The military mobilization capacity of both sides cannot be judged solely by the number of troops mobilized. Therefore, Li Hongzhang's previous evaluation did not comprehensively consider the social conditions of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The similarities and differences between the military systems of the Ming and Qing dynasties
Of course, there are two sides to everything. It is an inescapable basic fact that the Qing Dynasty was inferior to the Ming Dynasty in terms of military mobilization. The reason for this has to be found in the military system of the two Koreas.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty adopted a system of guards that integrated soldiers and peasants, and the founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang wanted to make the army self-sufficient, and the central and local governments subsidized a little more to reduce the burden on the society to raise soldiers. However, in terms of actual implementation, the life of the officers and men of the guard station was unspeakably miserable, and not only did they have to bear all kinds of errands from their superiors, but their actual income was also difficult to support their families. This kind of problem spread quickly, and even Zhu Yuanzhang heard about it, and warned the officers of the guard station not to press his subordinates too much in "The Great Message":
"The little army only gets a load of barn rice every month, and the husband is not at home to get the rice, except for a few liters of foot money, and the harmful storehouse officer has reduced a few liters of rice. When he came to the house, there were only seven or eight buckets of rice (six buckets of rice per month was more common), and the whole family wanted food and clothes, so where did he have spare money to give people......
The soldiers of the guard post had little income and heavy burdens, and if they could not survive, they naturally had to flee in groups. In the Ming Yingzong Dynasty, the number of officers and soldiers in the guard was reduced by one million. In order to maintain its military strength, the Ming court could only accept the conscription system, which was promoted to the interior from the southern and northern border towns.
The implementation of the conscription system has established close personal ties between the generals and the officers and soldiers at the lower levels. For example, Qi Jiguang formed the "Qi Family Army" on the basis of miners in Jiangsu and Zhejiang; Li Chengliang, the chief soldier of Liaodong Town, whose ancestral home was in Tieling, single-handedly covered the sky outside the pass and arranged other people in the family to important posts -- his sons Li Rusong, Li Rubai, and Li Rumei were appointed chief military officers, Li Rugui and Li Runan were appointed as staff generals, and his godsons Li Ning and Li Xing also became guerrillas or staff generals. However, the advantage of this is that the combat effectiveness of the army can still be maintained by personal relationships, and the Ming court has no better solution, so it can only let it go and bear part of the cost of raising troops. In this way, even if the commander leaves his post or dies, the army will not be reduced to a mess, but can be sustained by his relatives or sons. Taking a step back, even if there is no fighting for the time being and the number of troops is reduced, the relatives of these generals who have temporarily disarmed and returned to the field can return to the army at any time.
The increase in the personal affiliation of Ming officers and soldiers under the development of the conscription system also increased the demand for financial expenditure, and the Ming court had to maintain military spending to a certain level in order to motivate these border troops to serve the imperial court. If the salary is lowered or the salary is not paid, it is easy to cause a mutiny, creating an opportunity for the invasion of the surrounding ethnic minorities. Take Chongzhen as an example, even if he is suspicious of the front-line generals, he does not dare to discount the money. However, this barely maintained equilibrium could not last long. As the tide of revolts of the displaced people in the country intensified, the financial revenue of the imperial court was seriously affected, and the main source of money and food was cut off, Chongzhen had to order General Hong Chengchou to take the initiative to attack, trying to quickly get out of the financial predicament through a decisive battle of the main force. However, this decision fell into the trap carefully laid by Huang Taiji. As a result, Hong Chengchou was defeated in Songshan, and Emperor Chongzhen's hole cards were exhausted, so he could only trap the lonely city of Beijing.
After the Qing Dynasty unified the Central Plains, it learned some lessons from the Ming Dynasty in raising troops. In order to maintain the stability of the country, the Qing Dynasty adopted a cautious attitude in both the size and size of the army. On the one hand, the Qing Dynasty established the Green Camp system in response to the rebellion of the three feudatories, and on the other hand, it adopted a moderate control over the size of the army, because the vast interior had been in a state of peace and stability for a long time, and there was no practical need to maintain a large army. The Qing Dynasty's several military expansions were mainly concentrated in the northwest and southwest regions, and even when the Green Battalion was at its largest, the total number was only 660,000. By the Jiaqing period, the Qing Dynasty had even reduced the size of some of its armies. As for the Eight Banners, due to long-term lack of training and lax combat readiness, their role gradually changed from the main military force to a parasitic class dependent on state finances. By the Qianlong period, the role of the Eight Banners was more changed to that of the Green Battalion Supervisor, participating in the suppression of uprisings and maintaining order. For example, when suppressing the Lin Shuangwen uprising in Taiwan, the Green Battalion soldiers dispatched nearly 10,000 people, while the Eight Banners soldiers only dispatched about 100 people.
During the Qing Dynasty, although the interior was generally stable, there were occasional small-scale civil uprisings, such as grassroots riots organized by the Tiandihui and the White Lotus Sect. In order to respond quickly to these local insurgency, the organizational structure of the Green Battalion and the size of its garrison at the grassroots level were adjusted to be more dispersed. While this tactic has helped to contain insurgency at an early stage, it has also increased the complexity of military mobilization. For example, in the Opium Wars, the Qing had to mobilize troops from a dozen provinces to support the war in one or two provinces.
The scattered garrison of the Green Battalion was intended to nip the uprising in the bud, but new problems arose, and when the White Lotus Sect of the Jiaqing Dynasty launched a rebellion in the form of mobile warfare, the Green Battalion had some difficulty coping with it, and had to rely on the local regiment to train the militia. After the Taiping Rebellion, the green battalion system had existed in name only, and the regimental training of the countryside gradually became the main military force, and the rise of the Hunan army and the Huai army became an inevitable trend.
However, judging from historical facts, because the Qing Dynasty implemented certain financial reforms and used political and cultural means to reduce the cost of rule, even if the Eight Banners Green Battalion was no longer able to fight, it would not become a fatal problem affecting its rule.
Bibliography:
1. (Qing) Zhang Tingyu, History of the Ming Dynasty, Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, May 2015.
2. Luo Ergang, "Chronicles of the Green Battalion", Beijing: The Commercial Press, December 2011.
3. Cao Xun, "The Evolution of the Military System in the Ming Dynasty and the Change of Prosperity and Decline", Historical Research, June 2023.
4. Mao Haijian, "The Collapse of the Celestial Empire: A Re-study of the Opium War", October 2014.
5. Sun Wenliang and Li Zhiting: A Brief History of the Ming and Qing Wars, Beijing: Chinese University Press, October 2012.
6. Wang Huiming, "Research on the Recruitment System in the Ming Dynasty", Ph.D. dissertation, Northeast Normal University, 2021.
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