Abstract
Starting in 1875, the Qing government put great effort into the construction of coastal defenses, focusing on Beiyang and Nanyang, and in fact, Beiyang was the primary focus from 1875 to 1894. The defeat of the Beiyang Fleet in the first Sino-Japanese War directly affected China’s modernization agenda and the fate of the Chinese nation. Because the funds were the material basis for coastal defense construction, previous scholarship in China has also paid attention to the total amount of coastal defense funds when exploring the causes of the failure of the Beiyang Fleet. However, limited by its sources, previous scholarship has not considered the money used for purchasing six gunboats and expenditure on the coastal forts in the Weihai, Jiaozhou, Yingkou, Dagu, etc. Furthermore, this research has not seriously considered the process of raising coastal defense funds, and has failed to properly handle some data.
Drawing upon the newly published The Complete Works of Li Hongzhang and relevant unpublished archival sources in the First Historical Archives of China in Beijing, this article delineates the amount of each levy (as well as the total amount of coastal defense funds) during these two decades and the processes of collecting the levies.
This article demonstrates that Beiyang continually suffered from a very tight budget from 1875 to 1894. In response to the aggressive maritime policies of Russia and Japan in the period, the Qing government levied miscellaneous funds from different sources in order to purchase new ships and reinforce coastal forts. Beiyang’s coastal defense funds totaled 43.21 million taels of silver—around half of the Japanese navy’s expenditures. Because most of these funds were raised ad hoc in the face of crisis and the government did not establish a regular mechanism to raise funds, the government failed to provide stable financial support for Chinese coastal defense construction. The shortage of coastal defense funds was a key factor that caused the humiliating defeat of the Beiyang Fleet in the first Sino-Japanese War.
Keywords
Beiyang, coastal defense funds, amount of levy
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