Qing Dynasty, Shandong's Coastal Defense System And Military Deployment

The Shandong peninsular is at close range from Tianjin and our capital-Beijing from the sea and serve as a geographical barrier to these areas therefore enjoys a significant place of coastal defense. After Tsing Dynasty's founding, a complete but somewhat cursory coastal defense system was established along the Shandong coasts. Along the Shandong coasts, this system, pooling the concerted power of ground forces, fleets as well as some coastal defense constructions such as the emplacements of the Green Standard Army, combining the points, the lines as well as the picture as a whole concerning coastal defense, putting both the sea and the land into consideration, thus worked as a dynamic mechanism and played a crucial role in safeguarding the coastal defense of Shandong.However, due to the Tsing government's seclusion and its prohibition of sea trade and exchanges and its guiding strategy of putting land border defense beyond coastal defense, caring preventing the internal riots more than the external intrusions and laying emphasis on stopping its people into the sea, the coastal defense forces such as fleets and emplacements of Shandong and the whole China were quite weak and widely backward relative to the western powers in this period. In the late period of Tsing Dynasty, following suffering the humiliations of the Opium War, the Second Opium War as well as the Sino-French War respectively, the Tsing governments decided to build the modern navy. In this period, Shandong's coastal defense construction forged ahead through lots of frustrations and setbacks and saw many rises and falls. Generally, it experienced four periods, namely the period of simply improving the original coastal defense from the Opium War to the Second Opium War, the period of debate and reform of coastal defense from the Second Opium War to the mass debate on coastal defense followed by the period of the construction and development of the modern coastal defense with the founding of the Beiyang Navy as its biggest achievement from the mass debate on coastal defense to the 1894 Sino—Japanese War and the period without any coastal defense since Tsing's fiasco in the 1894 Sino—Japanese War. Due to Tsing government's lack of sea power mentality, its passiveness and short-sight, Beiyang Navy annihilated and Shandong's modern coastal defense construction fruits vanished in the 1894 Sino—Japanese War. Nowadays, in Shandong and other coastal provinces as well, the sea power must be tightly seized and invincible navies and sound coastal defenses must be founded in order to safeguard our national security and territorial integrity, secure the fruits of our economic construction as well as assure the great reemergence of the Chinese Nation.