Chapter 5 Themes of the four books

From the above discussion of "Qi Shan's betrayal of the country", the problems that stand out are: Should the failure of the Opium War be attributed to China's backwardness and conservatism, or should it be attributed to the traitorousness of Qi Shan and others?At that time, the correct way for China was to completely change the course, or to just reuse Lin Zexu and other bureaucrats who advocated resistance? The former looks at the problem from the perspective of Chinese society, and it is very difficult to solve it.The latter seems to pay more attention to the praise and criticism of the characters, and the countermeasures seem to be bright and simple.There is a difference in depth of understanding between the two.

The traditional Chinese historiography, which is based on biographical style, pays too much attention to the praise and criticism of characters. The historical figures who appear in historical works all have obvious labels on them.If you look at the problem from a higher level, you will find that whether it is Qi Shan or Lin Zexu, the matter of personal criticism is small, and the importance of exploring it is big. If we think about the questions that have already been raised and the questions that are inconvenient to expand in this introduction, we will see the core of the question, which is:

Under the circumstances at that time, could China win the Opium War?Is this a war in which victory or defeat is possible, or is it a war that is bound to fail?Was there anyone in the Qing government who could lead or guide this war to victory?If the war must be lost, how should we evaluate this period of history? There is no doubt that history will not change, nor will the outcome of the war.However, when historians study, analyze, and evaluate history, they will always pay attention to the unadopted suggestions and unused conditions at that time, and they will always pay attention to the turning points that may appear in history but failed to appear.In other words, they have many assumptions such as "if", "possible" and "what if" in their minds. Without these, they cannot study history, but can only become historical fatalists.

Then, assuming that we put forward all the hypotheses that could be realized at that time in the minds of historians, and then discuss, if these hypotheses are realized, will it change the failure of the Opium War? The problem suddenly becomes so simple, but it seems to become more difficult to solve this problem. If we zoom in, we can explore the significance of this war more than 150 years ago from today's perspective.We will see first that this war drags China into the world.Since then, China has been ravaged by foreign powers in every way; since then, the Chinese have endured all kinds of sufferings in search of a new way out.

The true meaning of the Opium War is to use fire and sword to tell the mission of the Chinese people: China must modernize and follow the trend of the world.This is a point of view that historians will agree with today. History has passed a century and a half.Everything before us tells us that this historical mission has not been completed.China is still lagging behind.We are also often confronted with the same old problems that plagued previous generations, so that we can act as if we can step directly into history. Of course, we also have reasons to shift all responsibility to history.In fact, we have also found many irrefutable reasons from history: the aggression of Western powers, the weak economic foundation, the large population base, and so on.But what we see the least in history is that we have made mistakes, despite what history has shown unequivocally.

The so-called "taking history as a mirror" is precisely to face mistakes.In this sense, a nation learns far more from its defeats than it gains from its victories.Victory is exciting, and failure is contemplative.A brooding nation is often more powerful than an excited one.History is supposed to provide this power. Because of this, I choose the Opium War, the starting point of China's modernization, to specifically analyze what mistakes the Chinese, especially the policy makers, made and how they made them, and try to answer some questions.It is impossible for this book to answer all the questions raised by the Opium War itself, but I have tried to provide some material for their real solution.

There are already enough and good enough books and papers on imperialist aggression, the impact on Western civilization, and the challenge to capitalism.The focus of this book is the Qing Dynasty as its opposite.For this reason, this book conducts textual research on various historical facts involving the Qing Dynasty during the war, analyzes various statements, and comments on the main figures in this war. Today, we are in the mid-1990s, and an exciting new century is upon us.Standing at the height of the end of the century, social scientists should not only look forward to the glory of the new century, but have the responsibility to summarize the scholarship of this century.In my opinion, the first thing that needs to be summarized is history.Only when people clearly see the past can they clearly foresee the future.

It was such a feeling that made me rewrite the history of the Opium War without being humble. At the end of this introduction, I would also like to explain that historians are born with a national complex that cannot be dismissed, and it should not evolve into protecting the nation in historical research.With this concept in mind, I am ruthless in my criticism of the Qing Dynasty, whether it is the idea of ​​compromise or the idea of ​​resistance. A nation's self-criticism of its own history is a solid guarantee for it to avoid repeating the mistakes of history.