| “Miner-power Event of Seven Prefectures” is a great continued wide range, long economic rights recovery movement in Yunnan in late Qing Dynasty. After the 19 th century, the rapid development of Western capitalism, the capitalist powers attempt to open the Chinese market through commodity input. To the 1870 s, the transition from world capitalism to monopoly capitalism begin, in order to get more raw materials and markets, they intensified competition for the colonial powers and the territorial division of the world. External invasion intensifies the Chinese frontier into extremely serious crisis. Due to its special geographical position, Yunnan, Located in the southwest border area of China, as the "back door" of China, UK and French settled,and in the end of the 19 th century reduced to UK and France’s sphere of influence.Afterward, UK, France has taken the aggressive action in Yunnan, constructs the railroad, to excavate the mine, aroused the s strong resentment of people in Yunnan province, the struggle has been ready to be set off.In April, 1900, the law Consul Fang Suya in Yunnan took the southwest populace to teach hatred, the counter-foreign unrest to grow to ever greater heights to need“self-defense” as to transport the weapon to enter Yunnan by, initiated “the Kunming lesson plan”. This lesson plan in fact is France invades China to cause the thunderbolt that China, France promote to expedite contradictory, but actually happen to becomes the excuse of UK, France to further seize Yunnan. As an excuse to that they lost the church grounds, they demanded compensation to the Qing government. Finally, the Qing government agreed the compensation of one hundred and twenty thousand and approved to take effect "Yunnan Mines statute" at the expense of to end it. At this point, represented by the “Miner-power of Seven Prefectures”, Yunnan Province’s whole territory of tenements really fall into the control of British and France.Loss of mineral rights lead to huge losses of Yunnan local politics and economy,Yunnan Province, the people of all groups thus set off a fierce struggle against the British and French to usurp the “Miner-power of Seven Prefectures”. The uprising led by Zhou Yunxiang as the representative of the Yunnan Province failed, but it showed people’s will of anti-official xenophobic, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal determination, which is a driving force for the subsequent struggle. Taking Yunnan overseas students in Japan as the main group, students started three times movementsto fight back mineral rights of seven governments while carrying out publicity and struggling to newspapers, magazines and other forms, and laid the public opinion foundation for the final victory of the struggle. Squires, in Yunnan, is the bridge between government and common people, is more representative of local interests,and thus when English, and French invaded Yunnan Province, they responded positively to the call of the student groups to join the fight to damage the legal rights,which urged the movement to a climax. In the people’s demands and struggle, the Qing government had to made moderate resistance though it always regard representations as solution, and ultimately used indemnity as costs to redeem the mineral rights of seven governments, ending ten years “Miner-power Fight of Seven Prefectures”.In the whole development process of “Miner-power Event of Seven Prefectures”aggressors of British and France, Qing Government, Yunnan Government, Squires of Yunnan Province, and its overseas students in Japan developed a complex fight over the remain or overdue of miner contractor and its belonging problems. They played a different role in this interactive relation. Facing domestic strife and foreign aggression,Qing Government tried its best to find a balanced point between domestic and foreign relationship, so that it could relieve the domestic contradictory and strengthen its government without offending foreign countries. However, when making decisions and policies, Qing Government still compromises with foreign countries. In this period, the local government with Yunnan and Guizhou government at its core tried to take measures to get rid of the overwhelming interference and threats from aggressors.But due to the constraints of the class, it just made some adjusts according to the central government’s policies, which didn’t get rid of the central government’s control.Yunnan squires whose interests were at off acted actively in struggling to get back the miner belongings. But compared with the student group and lower masses, they rebelled only in the acceptable scope of this struggle, Yunnan overseas students in Japan had made the democratic thoughts of anti-imperialist and anti-feudalism enjoy popular support, which great affected the development direction of Yunnan region,even the whole modern Chinese history. |
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