It is often said that history is created by the people. However, there are too many contingencies in history, and the ideological differences of the supreme rulers often change the direction of history and even profoundly affect the current world pattern.
More than 40 years ago, there was an armed conflict between China and the Soviet Union. The author was less than 10 years old at that time, but he had already deeply felt the high tension of China people, and even rural schools were digging tunnels. I remember a scene in the news documentary at that time: Chinese border guards wrote "1689" in the snow to declare the sovereignty of Treasure Island to the Soviet border patrol. From 65438 to 0689, the Qing Dynasty signed the Treaty of Nebuchadnezzar Chu with Russia. According to the treaty, not only Bao Dao, the vast fertile land north of Heilongjiang and east of Wusuli River are the territory of China, but Heilongjiang and Wusuli River are only inland rivers of China.
Two famous emperors were linked for the first time: Emperor Kangxi and Peter the Great.
1689 When the treaty was signed, they were all very young: Kangxi was 35 years old and had been in power for 28 years, while Peter the Great was only 17 years old and just came to power. 14 years later, 1703, the two emperors who had never met before seemed to be guided by the gods and began to do the same thing at the same time: Emperor Kangxi began to build a summer resort in Chengde, and Peter the Great began to build St. Petersburg. But the ruling thoughts of Emperor Kangxi and Peter the Great are quite different. Emperor Kangxi insisted on closing the country to the outside world, while Peter the Great was keen on opening to the outside world and absorbing Western European civilization. At first, we couldn't see the difference between these two different ruling ideas. However, with the passage of time, the fate of the two empires is quite different.
Peter's unusual behavior.
Nowadays, whenever people mention Peter the Great, they will talk about one of his extraordinary actions with relish. From 65438 to 0697, 25-year-old Peter the Great personally led a delegation of more than 200 people to Western Europe to learn advanced culture, technology and management methods. He deliberately concealed his true identity, visited schools, museums, factories and arsenals as mikhailov, and even attended a meeting of the British Parliament. Peter the Great also worked in a British shipyard and even served as the captain of the Dutch East India Company for a period of time. Peter the Great witnessed Western Europe with his own eyes. This country, which experienced the baptism of the Renaissance and emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, is full of vigor and vitality. At that time, Russia was still a closed and backward serfdom country with backward economy and culture, and religion occupied an absolute dominant position in the ideological and cultural field. Even in a big city like Moscow, 76% of the residents are illiterate. People usually maintain extremely ignorant and backward customs, and superstitious witchcraft prevails.
Peter the Great must be shocked by the huge gap between Russia and the developed countries in Western Europe. After returning home, he resolutely decided to rely on his supreme power, abandon Russia's arrogant and conservative tradition, learn from developed countries with an open mind, and boldly and decisively carry out a top-down comprehensive reform of the Russian regime. Peter the Great not only adhered to this ruling idea for a long time, but also deeply influenced his successor. For example, Alexander II once came to the detention center in Shibalai Street and ordered him to be locked in cell 227. Alexander II stayed in that cell for more than an hour, as if he wanted to experience the feelings of the revolutionaries he imprisoned.
Heatable brick bed
1704 is a summer resort built in the second year of Kangxi. At this time, the Qing Empire resisted Russian aggression, won the battle of Jacques and signed the Treaty of Nebuchadnezzar. Destroy Wu Sangui and other San Francisco forces at home, unify Taiwan Province provinces, and suppress the rebellion of Junggar Khan and galdan. At this time, the so-called "anti-dry Shi Sheng" has begun to take shape. The Qing Dynasty was undoubtedly the most powerful empire in the world at that time, and Emperor Kangxi was already at the top of the world. This year, Emperor Kangxi, who satisfied his ambition, continued to build a summer resort, and at the same time issued a very regrettable imperial edict, saying that the mining industry was not conducive to local management, and no one was allowed to ask for mining in the future. Since then, the Qing Dynasty has implemented the policy of banning mines for a long time, further killing the seeds of capitalism in China.
In fact, Kangxi went against the trend of the times and banned people from mining on a large scale, mainly because he was worried that a large number of people would gather, which would easily cause trouble and threaten his rule. 17 17, Emperor Kangxi once again promulgated the Treaty of Nebuchadnezzar, stipulating that mainland ships were not allowed to trade in Nanyang, a pirate cave. At that time, Nanyang was controlled by western colonial forces, and Kangxi was worried that the anti-Qing forces in the south of the Yangtze River would be supported by western colonists and endanger his rule. Emperor Kangxi's policy of "forbidding the sea" was followed by successive emperors.
Gan Long once said during his southern tour: "The customs and habits of Zhejiang people are easy to cause trouble, and foreign businessmen are mixed." Therefore, he restricted overseas trade for a long time and took strict precautions against foreigners to prevent them from supporting the Han people against the Qing Dynasty. This situation continued until the Opium War. The long-term closed-door policy not only seriously hindered the economic and cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, but also undermined the normal development of domestic industry and commerce, leaving the people in a closed and ignorant state for a long time, which eventually led to China losing its position as a world power.
Russia's Rise and External Expansion
During this period, Russia's consistent policy of opening to the outside world was to move closer to the west, with great economic and cultural progress and rapid military strength. At that time, the western part of Russia was a powerful France, the southern part was the Ottoman Turkish Empire across Europe, Asia and Africa, and its inland sea was the Mediterranean Sea. 1695 and 1696, the young Peter the Great led two expeditions to the Azores in the lower reaches of the Don River, forcing the Ottoman Empire to sign the Treaty of Constantinople in 1700 and agreeing to transfer the Azores to Russia. After more than two centuries, Russia and Turkey fought a series of wars for strategic places such as Caucasus, Balkans, Crimea and Black Sea.
Since then, in order to realize Peter the Great's expansion strategy of "freely entering the Indian Ocean", successive czars have tried to control Central Asia, and have fought fiercely with Iran for many years since 1804. Later Russia and Britain fought for Afghanistan for a long time. However, in the so-called "prosperous period of Kanggan" which lasted for more than 100 years, Korean foreign wars continued in the Qing Dynasty, while border wars with Myanmar, Vietnam and Nepal in the south rarely occurred during the Qianlong period. Among them, in the Sino-Burmese war from 1762 to 1769, the Qing army suffered heavy losses and did not win the real war. After the war, it only received nominal obedience from Myanmar.
At that time, Peter the Great kept one eye on the developed Western Europe and the Middle East, and the other eye on the underdeveloped Far East. Peter the Great and his successors constantly sent scholars, explorers and soldiers to the Far East, such as Bering, Koz levski, Ivane Vlev and Yakovr Khin. Among them, Bering is the most famous, and the Bering Strait is named after him. Soon, these remote and barren vast lands became Russian lands. Maybe the land came too easily. 1867, Russia sold Alaska covering 50 Taiwan Province provinces to the United States for $7.2 million. In that year, the cost of the court building in new york reached $654.38 million+0.2 million.
Today, Alaska has the largest oil field in the United States and the largest fishing ground in the world, and its value cannot be measured in dollars. However, Russia never easily seized Vladivostok from China in 1860. They have built a powerful military fortress here, which has never been attacked by foreign countries for a century and a half. Russia also named the nearby Peter Bay as Dawan.
1722, Emperor Kangxi died. Three years later, Peter the Great died. Their successors follow their established policies. At that time, Europe was gestating the industrial revolution. With Britain taking the lead in the bourgeois revolution, the workshop handicraft industry rose rapidly in cotton textile, mining, metallurgy, glass and other industries. Driven by Gaubert, the mercantilist minister of electricity, France also experienced large-scale mining, smelting and transportation, and even owned more than half of the European currency. With the continuous development of production and technology, the whole society is full of the desire to produce large machines. Industrial revolution in europe, which began in the middle of18th century, is profoundly changing the world. At the same time, the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution had a profound and decisive influence on modern western civilization.
Sculpture of Peter the Great
China in heaven was invaded.
Facing the rapidly changing world and the increasingly powerful northern neighbors, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty were arrogant and indifferent. For a long time, all walks of life have been in a state of "I don't know whether there is Han Dynasty or Wei and Jin Dynasties". 1793, Britain became the world's number one power. In order to establish trade relations with the ancient civilizations in the East, the British government sent McCartney across the ocean. After nine months' voyage, he finally arrived in China, and prepared celestial bodies, globes, clocks, meteorologists, muskets, renju guns, bronze guns, howitzers, warship models and other gifts for Emperor China. In foreign exchanges, the Qing Dynasty still prided itself on "going to heaven and going to earth", believing that all people who came to China should pay tribute to Emperor China to show their obedience to China.
Therefore, the Qing court asked the British envoy to give the emperor three kneels and nine knocks, but it was rejected. Before coming to China, magal carefully studied the biographies of Matteo Ricci and Zeng Zhaode about Wu Dong, and came to China to try to "read from the book". However, what he saw was far from the prosperous, powerful, civilized and progressive empire he imagined. Magal later wrote in "The Year of the Forbidden Sea": "In fact, since the Tatars conquered 150 years, this country has experienced amazing retrogression and even become a semi-barbarian." Marx and Engels called the Qing Dynasty the "Chinese Empire" ruled by the Tatars many times, saying that it was a "living person" in the history of human social development. Marx and Engels also called the social system of the Qing Dynasty a "decadent semi-civilized system" and the people of the Qing Dynasty a "semi-barbarian".
Many years later, the leaders of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were no different from the Qing court in dealing with foreign relations. After the Opium War, British envoy Mai arrived in Nanjing and asked for talks with senior officials of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom on important matters, but the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom refused to receive him with a "God-given China" attitude. At the same time, Zeng Guofan despised foreigners and thought they were uncivilized people. Qing people also generally despised foreigners, calling them "redheads" and "barbarians".
At first, Russia was just a backward country, located in the Volga River basin to the west of the Urals Mountains, and did not border with China in the early days. /kloc-In the 3rd century, Mongols occupied Moscow for a long time. Before the diary of a visit to Qing Dynasty was signed, JAXA fought back and China won an all-round victory. That is to say, from this time on, the Qing Empire called this neighboring country North Russia, which is still in use today. The historical memory of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's counterattack made the Qing Dynasty ignore the threat from the north for a long time. I'm afraid it's hard to be sure that Russia surpassed the Qing Dynasty. However, by the beginning of the19th century, the trade-off between the two empires became obvious. 18 12 years, Napoleon thought that Russia threatened his hegemony in Europe, so he went all out to invade Russia with 500,000 troops, and the result was a fiasco. I'm afraid it didn't attract the attention of the Qing Empire, why Russia defeated the most powerful enemy in the world at that time.
Twenty-eight years later, Britain forced the Qing Dynasty to surrender with only a few warships and thousands of sailors, destroying the myth of the Qing Dynasty in one fell swoop. From then on, foreigners' entry into Qing Dynasty was like entering their own backyard. The so-called Qing Dynasty is just a shadow of self-deception. In fact, the Qing dynasty lost its enterprising spirit from the late Kangxi emperor, so the palace was slowly eroded by long-term closed conservatism and arrogance. 1860, the British and French allied forces burned the Yuanmingyuan, and Russia seized 6.5438+0.5 million square kilometers of land from the Qing Dynasty and became a world power. Russia is not satisfied. In 897, Russia took advantage of the defeat of the Qing Dynasty in the Sino-Japanese War to occupy Lushun and Dalian. Then Japan and Russia fought fiercely for the northeast of China.
Just as the Italian Renaissance and the French Enlightenment awakened Europe, the advanced western culture was also an important driving force for the rise of tsarist Russia. During the 100 years since Peter the Great, Russia has changed from a country where illiteracy and superstition and witchcraft prevail to a world literary peak that keeps pace with France. Pushkin, Nikolai Nikolai Nikolai Gogol, belinsky, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, herzen, Chernyshevski, Chekhov, Tolstoy and many other world-famous writers emerged, as well as a large number of world-class cultural and scientific celebrities such as Tchaikovsky, Lie Bin, Mendeleev and Pavlov. Nowadays, people can see a statue of an old man in front of the Moscow National Library. It looks like Tolstoy or Lenin, but it is actually the author of Dostoevsky, the Treaty of Nebuchadnezzar. He was sentenced to death by the czar and was pardoned when he was executed. Dostoevsky was praised by later generations as "Russian among Russians" and became the representative of Russian national spirit and soul. As Tolstoy said, "literature is the only place where people hear anger and conscience cries."
Although Napoleon's invasion brought great disaster to the Russian people, the Russian people did not resist the influence of French culture. In Tolstoy's masterpiece Crime and Punishment, the protagonists often talk in French, which shows that French has become a fashion at least in the aristocratic class. Russian intellectuals accepted the values of freedom, equality and fraternity, which influenced some people. In February, the The Decemberists Uprising broke out in Russia. Some aristocratic revolutionaries accepted the values of freedom, equality and fraternity, then betrayed the interests of their own classes and opposed the czar's autocracy and serfdom by force, which was brutally suppressed. At the same time, a group of intellectuals with conscience risked exile, hard labor and death penalty, and waged a long and unremitting struggle with the Russian reactionary forces, which eventually prompted the tsar to abolish serfdom.
St.Petersburg
The tsars after Peter the Great tended to be conservative and reactionary in order to protect their own interests, but they did not kill all the advanced intellectuals, but left room. These Russian intellectuals have deeply influenced several generations of Russians. However, the notorious "literary inquisition" in the Qing Dynasty ruthlessly killed the Chinese nation's thought, culture and wisdom, thus ruining the country's development opportunities. Later, the Qing dynasty had only one instinctive reaction to the powerful enemy: solving the land and compensating. "Land, the foundation of the country, why not!" This is a famous saying in War and Peace.
More than 2000 years ago, Mao Dun also knew that compared with the land, the most beloved swift horse and the most beloved beauty were nothing. The Qing dynasty didn't know! In the face of such pain, it was not until 1898 that the Qing dynasty decided to put down its imperial airs and began to learn from the west and carry out comprehensive reforms, which was 200 years later than Peter the Great. However, this reform, known as the Reform Movement of 1898, died only after 103 days.