Externally, since the Industrial Revolution, Western countries have launched a frenzy of colonial wars, especially Britain after the Industrial Revolution, in order to build its own colonial system of an empire on which the sun never sets on a global scale. Asia naturally became the target of British colonial expansion. After successfully occupying India, Britain aimed its next target at China.
In 1840, Britain launched the Opium War and launched a colonial war against China.
In the First Opium War, the disastrous defeat of the Qing soldiers caused reflection among the scholar-bureaucrats within the Qing court. They began to realize that there was indeed a huge gap between the Qing Dynasty and the West. Therefore, under the instruction of Cixi and under the leadership of important court officials such as Zhang Zhidong, Zuo Zongtang, and Zeng Guofan, the Qing Dynasty launched a Westernization Movement to learn military science and technology and industrial production technology from the West.
In the early days of the Westernization Movement, the Qing Dynasty established a number of modern military factories with the main purpose of learning Western military technology. In the later period of the Westernization Movement, due to lack of funds, Zhang Zhidong and others opened modern Chinese civilian factories to raise funds. The core idea of ??this movement is to "learn from the foreigners and control the foreigners, and use Chinese elements and Western methods."
To be precise, exchanges between China and the West have not completely stopped. Even during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when the country was closed to the outside world, a large amount of foreign culture still poured into China. Eventually, under the influence of the Reform Movement of 1898 and the invasion of foreign powers, Chinese people gradually began to abandon their superior attitude and learn and absorb Western advanced technology and ideological culture with a humble and peaceful attitude.
Before the reform and reform, during the Westernization Movement, the self-rescue movement of feudal rulers, many people in the scholar-bureaucrat class gradually came into contact with Western ideas, and even absorbed and applied Western ideas. The last prime minister Zhang Zhidong is one of them. Although Zhang Zhidong was a traditional Chinese Confucian scholar and one of the important courtiers in the late Qing Dynasty, he was not as pedantic as many scholar-bureaucrats.
Zhang Zhidong believes that in order to achieve self-reliance and wealth, we must not only learn from Western military affairs, but also learn from Western political systems. In his view, the political system includes: historical records, official system, academic system, law, etc., and even includes agricultural administration, mining administration, industrial administration, commercial administration, military administration, shipping administration, etc., which are related to the national economy and people's livelihood.
These are the ideological cognitions he gradually refined in the process of presiding over the Westernization Movement, and gradually became the mainstream thoughts in the late Qing Dynasty. Driven by Zhang Zhidong, the late Qing Dynasty began to reform the old legal system. Liang Qichao once said: "Chinese learning is the body, Western learning is the application." Although this was Liang Qichao's personal statement, it became a wise saying at the time.
In addition, during this movement, the Westernization ministers also did something that today seems to be digging their own graves - establishing new schools.
The Westernizationists founded a large number of new schools, including: Jingshi Tongwen School, Fuzhou Shipbuilding School, Beiyang Naval School, etc. Moreover, with the support of the Qing government, large numbers of schoolchildren began to travel across the ocean to study in the West. Eventually, these new schools also trained a large number of technical talents for the Westernization Movement, such as Zhan Tianyou who built the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway.
These schools not only teach students some military techniques, but also spread some advanced Western culture among young students to inspire them. Over the next decade, however, it was the young people who came out of these schools, under the influence of the Westernization Movement, who confronted the founders of the schools at court and debated them in newspapers.
They continued to deny the old ideas of their ancestors and created another path for modern China to save the nation and survive - the reform reform, which was later the reform movement.
These young people became the new party in the mouth of the Westernization Movement, and later generations were more accustomed to calling them "reformers", although Qing officials during the Westernization Movement believed that it was only for China to catch up at the technical level. The west. In 1984, the total annihilation of the Beiyang Navy revealed the final result of this massive Westernization Movement, which marked the failure of the Westernization Movement that lasted for more than 30 years.
But it is undeniable that this Westernization Movement had a broad and far-reaching impact on later generations.
The Westernization Movement was not only a simple movement to learn Western military science and technology. The Western thought and culture mixed in this movement also opened a window to the outside world for people at that time. Under its influence, China’s early national capitalist class was born. Therefore, we cannot simply regard the Westernization Movement as a failed political movement of the feudal ruling class.
For us, what we see now is that in that feudal era, people’s desire to look at Western countries became stronger and stronger, and the Chinese began to realize that this ancient country had lagged behind There are too many other countries!
It can be said that in the process of learning Western thought and culture, the Westernization Movement was obviously more cautious than a series of subsequent movements. Although this is due to the limitations of the scholar-official class itself, Zhang Zhidong and others emphasized that "Western ideas should adapt to China's own culture." This point still has extraordinary reference significance for us today!
The Westernization Movement objectively stimulated the development of China's capitalism. Although it resisted the economic import of foreign capitalism to a certain extent, it never put China on the road to prosperity. Today, when we evaluate a series of ideological views and various movements of our predecessors, we need to take into account not only the historical background at that time, but also the efforts made by our predecessors to make us what we are today.