What does it mean to learn from foreigners and control them?

Teacher: learning, foreign: foreign, foreign, long: strength, advantage, skill: technology, skill, need: use, use, control: limit, deal with. Learn from foreign advanced technology and in turn deal with foreign aggression.

Lin Zexu was the first person to see the world. He recruited talents to translate foreign books and periodicals.

Wei Yuan was a great scholar with first-class knowledge of western learning at that time. He compiled the 100 volume Atlas of the Ocean, introduced western knowledge extensively, advocated "learning from foreigners to control foreigners", and tried to absorb advanced western technology to make China rich and strong.

Later, Yan Fu translated several western academic works, such as Evolution, Primitive Wealth, Group Learning, The Bound of Group Power, General Explanation of Society, Laws and Meaning, and introduced western evolution, economics, politics and sociology to China systematically.

Wei Yuan is a person who explicitly proposed to learn from the West in the modern history of China. He pointed out in "Description of a Sea Country": What is a book? He said, "attack foreigners with foreigners, pay foreigners with foreigners, and learn from foreigners to control foreigners." The so-called "learning from foreigners" mainly refers to learning a set of strengths of western capitalist countries in military technology. Wei Yuan said: "Three skills of foreigners: one warship, two firearms and three training methods." He not only advocated buying naval guns from the west, but also emphasized introducing advanced industrial technology from the west and manufacturing naval guns himself. The so-called "controlling foreigners" means resisting aggression and defeating the enemy. Wei Yuan explicitly raised the question of whether to learn from the "long skills" of western countries and whether to defeat foreign invaders. He stressed that those who are not good at learning from foreigners should be controlled by foreigners. Starting from the standpoint of anti-aggression, Wei Yuan showed brilliant patriotic thoughts by learning from foreigners and mastering foreigners.

Interpretation: By learning advanced western military technology, we seek ways to resist the powerful country.

Later, it refers to: learning advanced technology from the West to resist the West-deal with a man as he deals with you.