Comparison between Meiji Restoration and the Reform Movement of 1898

Although the Reform Movement of 1898 and the Meiji Restoration were both anti-feudal movements, their respective forces and opposing forces were quite different. The ideological standard-bearer of the Reform Movement of 1898 was Kang Youwei, who was the spiritual leader of this reform. The regime or flag is Emperor Guangxu. Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and others should say that they have made arduous efforts in the preparation and propaganda of ideological theory and made great contributions to this movement. However, whether writing on the bus, building a learning society, or taking a military plane later, it is mainly within the scope of giving speeches and providing solutions. All this, in the history of China's thoughts and politics, has indeed shone brilliantly. At that time, the shock in the dull ideological and political circles was similar to nuclear fission. Emperor Guangxu, nominally the Ninth Five-Year Plan, can command everything and everything. However, reformers are unarmed scholars. Tan sitong said: "I smile at the sky with a horizontal knife, and I will stay in the two Kunlun Mountains." Sadly, they have no knives and no armed forces. As for Emperor Guangxu, he was also a child emperor who cowered in the shadow of the Western Empress Dowager. Without armed forces, his seemingly "unlimited power" is actually extremely limited. Guangxu was in a powerless position all his life, which was determined as early as when he entered the palace. Guangxu was born in the deep palace, but he realized the corruption, incompetence and disadvantages of the feudal bureaucratic group by reviewing the throne. The army has no fighting capacity and the foreign war is a complete failure; Westernization enterprises consume a lot of state funds and suffer losses. Guangxu faced such a mess under the threat of the great powers, and realized that without reform, it would only ruin the country. He also has a certain understanding of western culture, which makes it possible for him to accept the political views of reformists. He got in touch with the works of Feng Guifen, Kang Youwei, Tang Zhen and other representatives of the reform trend, and actively advocated seeking the way of governing the country from the West. Guangxu, the last emperor in the period of humiliation, tried to change the social situation and situation in China at the end of 19. His main battle and support for political reform conform to the historical trend.

However, the reform and reform is a harsh political struggle, and its edge points directly at feudal autocracy and its decadent forces. The Reform Society was resisted by the defenders of authoritarian regime and the big bureaucrats entrenched in Tianjin, and the spirit of reform was intolerable by conservative secularism. By the end of 19, the die-hards in China still advocated that "the way of governing the country should be based on the integrity of the people's hearts and good customs first". Empress Dowager Cixi rebuked Emperor Guangxu's reform as "favoring one person and disturbing the family law". What did my ancestors call me? " [1] Reformers seized Guangxu, and enlightened officials supported Guangxu as the leader. Therefore, the old forces headed by Empress Dowager Cixi tried their best to weaken Guangxu, and all those who supported Guangxu were despised. Empress Dowager Cixi, the main leader of the Machiavellian feudal ruling forces, incorporated all the forces and groups that maintained the semi-colonial and semi-feudal ruling order under her banner. Just as the reformists pushed Emperor Guangxu to issue the Ming Dingguo as the imperial edict and began the New Deal reform, the old school headed by Cixi forced Guangxu to issue three imperial edicts on the fourth day after the Ming Dingguo was issued as the imperial edict. In addition to ousting Weng and Hé @ ①, there are two important measures: First, all ministers with two or more products are given new posts. This is the second time that Cixi "instructed the state affairs" and manipulated the power of employing people, which not only wooed the upper-level bureaucrats, but also prevented Emperor Guangxu from appointing reformists as senior officials and deterred them from entering the power center. The second is to appoint Rong Lu, a close friend, as the governor of Zhili, to command the Beiyang armed forces. This is a key step for conservatives to deploy a coup. Rong Lu once said to Empress Dowager Cixi: "With the appointment of bandits by the emperor (referring to reformists), there is no guarantee that nothing will happen for a long time. Beijing and Tianjin are close at hand, and the Beiyang army can make a town system. " [2] So the Minister of Military Affairs was dismissed.

In a word, the reformists have no real military and political power and no support from the broad masses of the people. They only have a puppet emperor, and his position is in danger every day. Therefore, when the decisive battle approaches and the forces of change and counter-change confront each other, they can't find a life-saving raft, so they can only regard Yuan Shikai as "Noah's Ark". When Yuan Shikai betrayed them, from Emperor Guangxu to Kang and Liang, and then to the so-called "six gentlemen", only Yingtai was banned, or fled, or Jinghua, but never deterred the powerful enemy.

On the other hand, Japan also faced a semi-colonial crisis during the Meiji Restoration, but the Meiji Restoration took place in 1868. At that time, world capitalism had not fully entered the imperialist stage, and most of the powers were busy with other things, ignoring the struggle for colonies. Jing Shangjing, a Japanese historian, said, "The opposition between Britain, France and Russia ... contained the invading demons of various countries. The American Civil War and its aftermath made it unable to launch aggression in the East. All this will help Japan get rid of the semi-colonial crisis. "

On the eve of Meiji Restoration, the reformists, led by Changzhou Fan, launched an anti-feudal anti-China movement with the slogans of "opening Hong Kong to oppose political power" and "strengthening separatist regime". Changzhou, Satsuma, Tosa and Fei Qian not only have plans and programs of "eight strategies in a boat", "restoring ancient ways to the imperial court" and "resigning from office and accepting land", but also actually "political power with the emperor as the core", which is precisely the leader and promoter of reform.

Secondly, another important difference between the Reform Movement of 1898 and the Meiji Restoration is that their historical and cultural backgrounds are completely different. The Japanese nation has an open historical tradition of absorbing foreign cultures. Ji Tianmao, Japan's first postwar prime minister, once admitted that Japan had been learning from China for more than two thousand years. Later, Japan learned a lot from North Korea and India. During the shogunate period, despite the closed door policy, it absorbed a lot of new knowledge from the Netherlands and formed a very meaningful so-called "orchid study". Before and after the Meiji Restoration, Japanese rulers suffered a lot and realized from the cruel reality that they must learn from the West in science, culture, politics and economy, otherwise they could not survive. Trying to learn from the west has become a major trend and atmosphere in the ruling and opposition parties. Japanese people neither totally reject foreign cultures nor blindly worship them, but rationally absorb the excellent parts of foreign cultures, creatively re-smelt them, and gradually become a part of Japanese tradition. This is a stable and "open" cultural system.

The situation in China is more complicated. When history entered modern times, advanced China people shouldered the mission of "saving the country" and "rejuvenating China" and sought the truth of saving the country from the west. Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan's "learning from foreigners" is to safeguard the independence of the Great Qing Dynasty. Hong Xiuquan reformed western Christianity in order to establish a paradise of "equality between men and women" and "single theocracy"; Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao carried out political reform and took the capitalist road; Sun Yat-sen put forward the idea of "using French and Western civilization" ... which only reflected one aspect of China's modern national conditions. Historically, the Han and Tang Dynasties were the era of great opening in history. However, since the Anshi Rebellion, especially after the end of the Tang Dynasty, it gradually fell into a closed state. Relatively speaking, the Song Dynasty was not very closed. After Zheng He's voyage to the West, the society in Ming and Qing Dynasties was basically closed. The social consequences of behind closed doors are extremely serious. If economic isolation is an important source of China's modern economic backwardness, then ideological and cultural isolation is an important reason for China's modern ideological and cultural backwardness. Ganjia Sinology has made an indelible contribution to the collation of ancient historical materials. But people should not forget that it was on this day that the scholars of the Gan family melted their amazing talents and great energy into history, and made what Liang Rengong said: "Since the Gan family, every family has made great contributions, and everyone in the Eastern Han Dynasty learned from you." Dai Zhen, Hui Dong, Jiao Xun and Ruan Yuan lived not in the era of Dante and Boccaccio, but in the era of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot. When Ji Xiaolan began to write Notes on Reading Micro-thatched Cottage after compiling Siku Quanshu, he preached the causal theories of "people's hearts are slightly warm, ghosts and gods can be seen" and "in the dark, they seem to be wronged" [3], it was the time when the French Revolution broke out and went on. Looking at history at this point, people often sigh: If China at that time was not self-enclosed, but could open its eyes to see the world, with the talents and energy of Jiahan masters, its achievements would be brand-new, and China's academic thoughts would not fall behind, so that during the Second Opium War, a joke was made that government officials relied on slang to deal with foreign enemies. It is in this closed historical atmosphere that the tragic cry of the volunteers of the Reform Movement of 1898 is particularly lonely.

Third, China is a big country, while Japan is a relatively small island country. This difference in spatial background also had a considerable impact on the success or failure of the Reform Movement of 1898 and the Meiji Restoration. As mentioned above, both China and Japan had the seeds of capitalism at that time. As far as the total economic factors of modern capitalism are concerned, China seems to be superior to Japan. However, in view of the size of China and the relatively small size of Japan, the proportion of capitalist economic factors in the total social economy is higher in Japan than in China. In terms of political, ideological and cultural influence, the emperor's accession to the throne will affect many parts of China and even shake most parts of the country. In China, what happened in the capital will take a long time, even if it is to spread to the major economically developed areas in China, let alone remote areas. Facing the vast land and bureaucratic layers, whether it is the imperial edict of Emperor Guangxu or the lion's roar of Kang and Liang, in many places, it seems to have entered an unfathomable "black hole" and disappeared. China society is so closed that the countryside after the Revolution of 1911 is still in a state of political ignorance. You can see this clearly when you watch The True Story of Ah Q.

Finally, from the comparison of the strategies used by the reformists, the reformists headed by Emperor Meiji were more organized and orderly, while the operation of the Reform Movement of 1898 was chaotic and hasty.

1868 After the establishment of the Meiji Restoration regime, all the governors were disintegrated by abolishing the clan and setting up the county, and the "equality of the four people" was implemented; Abolishing the land ownership of feudal lords through local tax reform is of great significance to the development of capitalism; Enlightened culture, prosperous industry and rich national soldiers brought western culture into Japan in large quantities, especially popularized primary education. By the end of Meiji, the national enrollment rate had exceeded 95%. 1890, the emperor issued an imperial edict on education, which brought the moral norms of schools, society and families into the track of militarism. It is the success of this orderly political, economic and educational reform that enabled Japan to quickly walk out of the feudal era and begin to accept bourgeois human rights and democratic ideas, laying the foundation for the establishment of a bourgeois modern country.

The strategy of the Reform Movement of 1898 seems to be too hasty, and the priorities in the New Deal reform are unclear and the measures are improper. More than 100 imperial edicts were issued in the New Deal 103. The contents of the reform include politics, economy, military affairs, culture and education, and even trivial measures such as repairing streets. The imperial edicts of the New Deal are pouring in, and every measure is very important. As a result, what is primary and what is secondary is not clear to even the reformers. Due to the bloated bureaucracy of autocratic monarchy, judging from the content of the new policy of reforming institutions, Kang Youwei once advocated that it was a relatively safe measure not to cut old official posts, but to add new ones and advocate the separation of official titles. Emperor Guangxu ordered the abolition of more than a dozen yamen at a time, which infringed on the privileges and status of a large number of officials and was bound to intensify contradictions and make them rise up against political reform.