The Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Qing Dynasty and ended the autocratic monarchy that ruled China for thousands of years. This is a great milestone in China's modern history. An anti-imperialist and anti-feudal democratic revolution began in a relatively complete sense, opening the floodgate for China's progress. In the process of rejuvenating the Chinese nation and developing China society, the Revolution of 1911 has made indelible historical achievements.
The modern history of China is a history full of humiliation, suffering and struggle, and it is also a history in which people with lofty ideals fought bravely and explored hard to save the nation and realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
The root of this history can be traced back to the Opium War launched by the British invaders in 1840.
At this time, the British industrial revolution has been completed, and it is doing its best to expand to the world market and plunder the colonies. In order to make huge profits, the British government supported and encouraged British businessmen to smuggle opium into China, which not only caused a large outflow of silver from China and the financial crisis, but also seriously poisoned the physical and mental health of China people.
1June, 839, imperial envoy Lin Zexu publicly destroyed the confiscated opium in Humen, thus safeguarding national interests and national dignity. However, Britain took the opportunity to launch a long-planned war of aggression against China, known in history as the Opium War.
The Opium War broke out. Incredibly, the closed-door Qing government knew nothing about the development of hostile British and western capitalist countries.
1842 in may, the opium war has been going on for nearly two years, and Daoguang raised such a question:
Faced with these problems, the civil and military officials in the Qing Dynasty were also tongue-tied, and no one knew.
In this war against colonial aggression, the corrupt and incompetent Qing government was finally defeated and forced to sign the shameful treaty of nanking:
With the signing of treaty of nanking, China began to lose its complete sovereignty and dignity as an independent country. The Opium War was the beginning of a series of humiliation and suffering in modern China, and the development of China's history began to show a major turning point.
With the invasion of western capitalism, the development of China society gradually deviated from the original track and gradually became a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.
However, the failure of the Opium War did not awaken and cheer up the feudal ruling class. They are still immersed in the narcissism of "de-China", and even regard "treaty of nanking" as a "peace treaty of ten thousand years", taking it for granted that the world will be peaceful from now on. As Marx pointed out:
1856, the second opium war broke out. The British and French invaders not only captured important coastal cities such as Guangzhou and Tianjin, but also occupied Beijing, the ruling center of the Qing government. Emperor Xianfeng fled to Chengde in haste until his death in 186 1.
1860 65438+1October18 After the British and French allied forces looted Beijing, Yuanmingyuan, a world miracle, was completely burned down, and the invaders who claimed to be "civilized people" wrote a shameful page in the history of human civilization.
The French writer Hugo once described this atrocity:
The British and French invaders forced the Qing government to sign unequal treaties such as the Tianjin Treaty and the Beijing Treaty, and further seized economic and political privileges from China, which brought even heavier disasters to the people of China.
Russia also began to fish in troubled waters. It successively adopted the Aihui Treaty, the Beijing Treaty and a series of unequal treaties behind it, encroaching on China's territory of more than 654.38+05,000 square kilometers, becoming the country that plundered the most territory from China.
The Second Opium War further plunged China into the abyss of semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.
1On July 25th, 894, the Japanese army launched a surprise attack on the Qing army after careful planning. Due to the lack of war preparation and unified and clear strategic deployment, the Qing army was in a very passive state from the beginning, and it was defeated repeatedly, that is, the Sino-Japanese War.
165438+1October 29th is the 60th birthday of Empress Dowager Cixi. She still feasts in the palace, leaving all military affairs behind. In order to prepare for this celebration, the Qing court used the salary and border defense funds of the Ministry of Housing, and even misappropriated a large amount of military expenses of the Beiyang Navy.
After the Sino-Japanese War broke out, the top priority of Qing government officials was not how to resist foreign enemies, but what gifts to give to Empress Dowager Cixi.
Under Li Hongzhang's policy of "avoiding wars and protecting ships", beiyang fleet was trapped in the harbor and caught between Scylla and Charybdis. In February 1895, 1 1, the prefect of Beiyang Navy committed suicide in the prefect's mansion. A few days later, the Japanese naval fleet entered the Ahava military port and landed in Liu Gongdao. The Beiyang Navy, known as the "first fleet in Asia", was completely annihilated.
/kloc-In March of 0/4, Li Hongzhang boarded a ship in Tianjin and went to Japan for peace. In the face of aggressive Japanese invaders, the Qing government can only submit to humiliation.
/kloc-in April of 0/7, the Qing government was forced to sign the treaty of shimonoseki with Japan;
After the news of the signing of treaty of shimonoseki reached Taiwan Province Province, the people of Taiwan Province Province "gathered in the city and cried in the fields day and night". In order to defend the sacred territory of the motherland, the Qing government continued to carry out armed resistance against the Japanese army for half a year, killing and injuring more than 30,000 Japanese people. During the half century of Japanese colonial rule, the people of Taiwan Province Province never stopped their struggle against the invaders.
The signing of treaty of shimonoseki further stimulated the ambition of western imperialist powers to invade China. They are like a group of hungry wolves scrambling to pounce on them, setting off a frenzy to carve up China.
In just a few years, the great rivers and mountains in China have been fragmented, and the whole land of China has presented a shocking picture. When Japan occupied Taiwan Province Province, Russia extended its hand to the northeast, and Britain took the Yangtze River basin as its sphere of influence in an attempt to split Xinjiang and monopolize Yunnan. Germany invaded Jiaodong, and France coveted large areas of South China.
By 1898, the flags of imperialist powers had been erected in Lushun, Dalian, Ahava, Jiaozhou Bay, Kowloon and Guangzhou Bay, and many important railway trunk lines had been seized by them. Patriot Tan Sitong wrote a poem full of sadness and indignation, "Forty million people shed tears together, where is China in the end of the world?"
The huge compensation stipulated in treaty of shimonoseki made the Qing government financially bankrupt. In order to raise reparations, the Qing government forcibly apportioned the issue of "Zhao Xin shares", and only raised less than 5 million taels of silver. The Qing government not only continued to plunder the people's fat and paste, but also borrowed money from western powers.
Every time the Qing government borrowed money, it strengthened the control and plundering of China by foreign powers, further increased the burden on the people of China, intensified domestic social contradictions, and laid the groundwork for the final demise of the Qing government.
1900 In June, Britain, Russia, France, the United States, Italy, Japan, Germany and Austria formed Eight-Nation Alliance and launched a vicious war of aggression against China. For everyone in China, this year is a very humiliating year.
/kloc-at dawn in August of 0/5, with the approaching of gunfire in Eight-Nation Alliance, Empress Dowager Cixi put on civilian clothes in a hurry and fled to xi 'an with Emperor Guangxu in a panic. Eight-Nation Alliance captured Beijing and began to burn, kill and plunder without humanity. Wherever the invaders went, corpses were everywhere, and Beijing was repeatedly looted.
190 1 On September 7th, Li Hongzhang signed an unprecedented humiliating "Xin Chou Treaty" on behalf of the Qing government, which stipulated that:
According to the population of China at that time, one tael of silver per person was paid off in 39 years, and the total interest was nearly one billion taels, which was equivalent to more than ten times the fiscal revenue of the Qing government in that year. Until 1943, more than 30 years after the demise of the Qing Dynasty, China continued to pay reparations.
1June, 902, Empress Dowager Cixi returned to Beijing. She thanked the western powers for their forgiveness (including the credit of the famous prostitute Sai Jinhua) and tried her best to please them. "Measuring China's material resources and winning the favor of the country" became the foreign policy of the Qing court.
The Qing court even decorated the invaders and rewarded the Japanese generals who invaded their own country. At this point, the Qing government really became a "foreigner's court" and completely became a declining government that "hindered economic and social development internally and could not defend national sovereignty externally".
The imperialist aggression and the decay of feudal rulers have brought great disasters to the Chinese nation, and at the same time, they have also educated the people of China from the opposite side and inspired the resistance of the people of China.
In that stormy era, people and people with lofty ideals who were unwilling to endure slavery and oppression woke up in suffering and marched in the dark, setting off a wave of struggle against imperialism and feudal forces.
Lin Zexu was the first person who "opened his eyes to see the world" in modern China. When Guangdong led the struggle against opium and Britain, he organized the translation of western books and periodicals. On his way to Xinjiang, he handed over the first draft of Shikoku and related materials collected by himself to his friend Wei Yuan, and Wei Yuan compiled the Atlas of Sea Countries on this basis.
In the book Hai Tu Zhi, Wei Yuan put forward the idea of "learning from foreigners to control foreigners" and advocated learning advanced military technology from the West to resist western invaders. Although these appeals did not arouse much response at that time, they had a great influence on later politicians and thinkers.
The cruel exploitation and oppression of the Qing government pushed the broad masses of people to the brink of hunger and death. There was no choice but to fight, and the peasant class opened the curtain of anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle.
185 1 year 1 month1day, Hong Xiuquan announced an uprising in Jintian Village, Guiping County, Guangxi Province, and established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement lasted 14 years and moved to 18 provinces, which effectively shook the ruling foundation of the Qing government and effectively attacked foreign aggression. Not only promulgated the Tencel System, put forward the idea of equal distribution of land, but also put forward the first systematic capital development plan in China's modern history-Zi Zheng Xin Chapter.
/kloc-At the end of 0/9, under the unprecedented national crisis, the Boxer Rebellion first rose in Shandong, and then quickly developed to Zhili, Beijing and other places. The Boxer Rebellion put forward slogans such as "helping the Qing Dynasty to destroy the foreign countries" and directed the struggle at the imperialist aggressors.
Under the joint suppression of Chinese and foreign reactionary forces, although the Boxer Rebellion finally failed, it fought to the death with the most primitive knives and guns and the most advanced weapons, which showed the indomitable resistance spirit of the people of China and shattered the dream of western powers to carve up China.
In order to save the deepening ruling crisis, some members of the feudal ruling class, such as Yi V, Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and Zuo, advocated importing and imitating western weapons and equipment, learning western science and technology, and setting up westernization.
With the goal of "self-improvement" and "seeking wealth", the Westernization School began to set up modern military industries and civilian enterprises, set up new naval and military forces, set up new schools and sent overseas students, hoping to make Qiang Bing rich and get rid of foreign enemies.
The Westernization Movement lasted for more than 30 years, which really brought some modern factors and breath to China society. However, the Westernization Movement did not really make China prosperous, and the fiasco of the Sino-Japanese War declared the bankruptcy of the Westernization Movement.
1895, Kang Youwei, together with 1200 juren who took the exam in Beijing, launched a "letter on the bus", demanding that the emperor "cancel the contract and refuse to make peace, and move the capital to fight again". And strongly called for political reform to save the national crisis.
Under the impetus of "reformists" represented by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Emperor Guangxu issued the imperial edict "Ding Mingshi Kingdom" on June 1898+0 1 day, announcing the beginning of political reform. For a time, the Qing dynasty had a new atmosphere.
However, the content of the reform touched the interests of the "die-hards" headed by Empress Dowager Cixi. In September of 2 1 year, Empress Dowager Cixi staged a coup, imprisoned Emperor Guangxu in Yingtai, Zhongnanhai, and wantonly killed the reformists. On September 28th, Tan Sitong, Yang Rui, Liu Guangdi, and Kang were killed in Beijing Caishikou, known as the "Six Gentlemen of the 1898 Movement".
The blood of the martyrs did not flow in vain, and their thoughts and actions inspired many patriotic people of insight. The lesson of blood prompted some people to give up the idea of improvement and embark on the road of revolution.
Although the failure of the Reform Movement of 1898 played an enlightening role, it also fully demonstrated that it was impossible to develop capitalism in semi-colonial and semi-feudal China by relying on the top-down reform of the feudal ruling class.
The cruel reality forced patriots such as Ma Xulun, Cai Yuanpei and Zhang Jian to come to the conclusion:
"Revolution" has also begun to become the main theme of the national salvation movement.
Since the Opium War, after the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Reform Movement of 1898, the Boxer Rebellion and the indomitable struggle of the people of China, countless people with lofty ideals are struggling to explore the road of saving the country and the people. These struggles and explorations have promoted the progress of China under certain historical conditions every time, but failed again and again.
Facts show that the old peasant war could not accomplish the national mission of saving the country and surviving without touching the self-improvement movement and reformism on the feudal basis.
In this case, the Revolution of 1911 led by Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing, Wang Yi and Wang Yi officially kicked off on June 5th.