Study On The Yuehan Railway At The End Of The Qing Dynasty By The Shen News Material Primarily

From 1896 to the 1911 Revolution, the Yuehan railway's construction had experienced the hard process and has become one of important issues on politics and economy at the end of the Qing Dynasty. The Shen News had a more exhaustive report and commentary entirely about it, became the precious material of the Yuehan railway's researching. After the War of Jiawu war, the Qing government and the public started to focus on the construction the railway, taking it best way to resist the outside force, to promote the nation'power , and to seek the prosperous. Therefore the Yuehan railway was put into the most important position. The most important and crucial problem of construction the Yuehan railway was to raise the money. To complete the railroad rapidly, the Qing government and the US company Hexing signed The Yuehan Railway Loan Agreement. Because the Qing government didn't make it clear about the difference between "the foreign debt" with "the foreign stock", raised a mortgage on the railway and neglected protecting the economic rights and interests, the economic rights and interests forfeited with the subscription of the agreement. After several years, in order to protect the railway economic rights and interests, the Qing government and the public demanded to abolish the loan agreement intensely. In this process, the national economic rights and interests had a direct relation with loaning. In people's minds, it had been formed gradually that loaning to the foreign countries was betraying the national economic rights and interests, on the contrary was patriotic and defending the national economic rights and interests. Because of the simple thought ,people began to go toward "the civilized antiforeign" on the economy. Under the great public opinion preasure, the Qing government redeemed the Yuehan railway with the public and made it managed by three provinces. Guangdong decided to depend on the general business, Hunan the government-supervised business, and Hubei the government. However, three provinces managing the road slowed down, especially Hunan, Hubei, had difficulty in raising funds. Because of the above ,the Qing government tended to borrow the foreign loan again. In 1909, Zhang Zhidong concluded the loan with four country's consortium from British, French, German and the US. But in this time's public opinions, the people struggled against loan to the foreign country directly and formed massively storm of resisting loan."the civilized antiforeign" prevailed in that time. Dispite of the public opinion, the Qing government forced to take the policy of "the railroad state-owned". So the movement of the public against loan became more intense ,the revolution succeeded, the Qing Dynasty was destructed. In the side, the hard construction of the Yuehan railway exposed that the Qing government took a rash step. In the other side, the thought trend of the "civilized antiforeign" in public was showed after the Yuehan railway being redeemed. In our eyesight , the shortcoming of this thought is more than the advantage of its. In the modern China , there are a lot of difficulties depending upon own strength completely to build a kind of large-scale enterprise such as building raidway in situation of deficiency in fund, technical power and managerial experience. In the process of realizing the industrialization in China, we must remove this thought and make uses of the foreign fund, the advanced technology and the managerial experience of the developed country as far as possible .Then it is possible to reduce gap between the developed country with us more quickly.