As we all know, the demise of the Qing court is largely due to the defection of the new army, and the new army is also the royal guard that the late Qing Dynasty is proud of, and the Qing court began to focus on construction after the Sino-Japanese War, not only equipped with advanced Western firearms, but also trained troops in the West, so why did this army later have a command failure?
The organizational structure of the Beiyang New Army is relatively complex and should be subdivided. Macroscopically speaking, it is divided into two categories: one is the Beiyang New Army in the hinterland of Gyeonggi, that is, the beiyang six towns we often call it, which is mainly responsible for defending the safety of the capital and the royal family, and is also an elite unit in the new army; the other is the local new army, like the Hubei new army that launched the Wuchang uprising, with tens of thousands of people stationed in the local area and uniformly dispatched by the imperial court.
The failure of the Forces nouvelles can be blamed on two main points
First, after Cixi's death, the government of the late Qing Dynasty lacked a strong ruler with prestige and strength, and internal divisions were serious.
In the late Qing Dynasty, internal and external troubles were faltering, many foreign wars were lost, too many unequal treaties were signed, the peasant movement was also one after another, and there was never a collapse of political power, and a very important point was the solidity of the ruling layer with Cixi as the mainstay, Cixi grasped the power with a tight and measured manner, and the way to control people was good, and the power of Zeng Guofan, Zhang Zhidong, Li Hongzhang and other powerful ministers was controlled under his control, and the power of all parties was effectively balanced, so during her term of office, there was no collapse within the ruling class, but instead the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, foreign affairs, and diplomacy. Let the haze shrouded late Qing see a glimmer of hope for the future.
After Cixi's death, there was a major collapse within the ruling class, and the junior regent Zaifeng broke the bureaucratic balance of the Manchu and Han dynasties, and then Xuantong succeeded the lord Shao Guo, up to the central power ministers, down to the opposition warlords who were alienated from the Qing imperial family, creating political opportunities for the ambitionist Yuan Shikai.
Second, the creation of a new army is the first military system innovation in China's history, there is no experience to follow, and it will be difficult to use the old system to naturally command the new type of army, and it is easy to become a private soldier of the powerful.
Judging from the training methods of the new army, it is completely different from the traditional Chinese method of training troops; in addition to the fact that the organization is completely different from the traditional Chinese battalion system, it is also very different from the traditional Qing army training method in instilling political ideology; in the past, the whole army was loyal to a certain emperor, and the whole army recognized the emperor, so the emperor's control over officers and pawns at all levels was obviously insufficient, and it all depended on the subjective loyalty of the generals. The high-level leadership team was all transferred to become a close general, so in one fell swoop they won the absolute control of the new army, so that only Yuan Shikai was known in the army, but not the emperor.
The guidance of the local generals to the ideological work of the new army was even more ineffective, so the revolutionaries took advantage of the situation and wantonly propagated and instigated remarks, and at the end of the Qing Dynasty, local officials and officials ruled corruption, and did not pay attention to this problem, so the well-equipped new army became the dowry of the revolutionaries, and in the final analysis, the Qing court did not do enough to guide the ideological guidance of the new army.