Qing dynasty naval defeat 'a warning' for PLA

The humiliating defeat of the Qing dynasty's Beiyang Fleet in the mid-1890s is a lesson from history that China must learn as it seeks once again to become a maritime power, naval experts say.

At a sea-power workshop at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law late last year, PLA representatives and naval experts said they were worried that the problems and failures of the Beiyang Fleet would recur in today's naval modernisation, unless China learned from that painful chapter in its history.

The Beiyang (Northern Seas) Fleet was one of four modern naval fleets created by the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) in the late 19th-century's "self-strengthening movement". Responsible for the security of the Yellow Sea, a frequent route of invasion, it became Asia's most powerful fleet after the Qing government ordered 12 warships from Germany and Britain in 1888.

In 1894, on the eve of war with Japan, the Beiyang Fleet matched Japan's entire navy numerically, with the German-built steel-turret battleships Dingyuan and Zhenyuan its most powerful warships. Between 1881 and 1889, the fleet also acquired a squadron of eight armoured cruisers, most of which were built in Britain or Germany. But the whole fleet was sunk or captured by the Japanese during the first Sino-Japanese war, which lasted from August 1894 to April 1895.

At the workshop, naval experts blamed the fleet's defeat on the Qing government's corruption and its reluctance to embrace international maritime law or build a truly modern and transparent naval system.

"Interest groups put their own priorities above the national interest, and they frequently had conflicts with each other," Chen Yue, a specialist in naval history, was quoted as saying by the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post. "These are some of the key reasons for the fleet's defeat in the war.