One of the many misconceptions about the Opium War is that China lost only militarily in the Opium War, but in fact China was a total and all-round defeat, by no means more than military.
How much did the First Opium War cost? According to the research experts in the Opium War, based on the research of first-hand materials, China finally spent thirty million taels of silver in this war.
So how much did the British spend? In the "British Parliamentary Document", it can be seen that the British government has detailed statistics on a bill of war expenditures against China issued by the House of Commons when questioned, and finally converted, it is equivalent to 12.63 million chinese silver taels, that is to say, it is only equivalent to 40% of China.
This battle was fought in China, britain has traveled thousands of miles to come, China has a geographical advantage, why is the result that China's military expenditure is more than twice that of Britain?
There are many reasons, the most important of which is that a lot of China's military spending has been embezzled. How can it be corrupt? In fact, the means are very simple and crude.
The officers on the Zhejiang front pondered the means of getting rich, fabricated a 9,000-strong "Nan Yong", and in the name of this, defrauded the state of 100,000 taels of military expenses; Zheng Dingchen, the son of zheng Guohong, the chief soldier, fabricated a 20,000-strong water army and took the state's salary of 30,000 to 400,000 taels. Such incidents occurred one after another in the Opium War, leaving a lot of information, and one-third of the military expenditure was directly embezzled.
Why are military salaries so easily embezzled? Because China's finances are not transparent, the supervision mechanism is not perfect. So the Opium War, from another point of view, was also a war of the financial system.
Many people say that the Opium War was lost because China's emperors and magnates were capitulators and were not determined to resist in the war. The British did not occupy many ± in China, nor did they hit the Chinese capital, so why not fight? Continue to fight, fight until the country is occupied halfway, fight until you give up the east of Xi'an, and have a protracted war, can't you? After all, Britain is a small country, we are a big country, we can consume it.
Fighting a protracted war is really not enough, and in terms of attrition, we cannot consume Britain. In fact, as soon as the war began, China had no money. Let's look at the share of military spending in the Opium Wars in the finances of Both China and Britain.
The annual revenue of the Qing Dynasty was about 40 million taels. Specifically by 1840, China's fiscal revenue was 39.04 million taels. In other words, the military expenditure of the Opium War accounted for 76 percent of China's annual fiscal revenue.
Britain's fiscal revenue that year was 155.4 million taels, which is to say that it was exactly four times that of China, and the military expenditure was only forty percent of China's consumption. So for Britain, the war cost only eight percent of its annual income. Can China win such a war? If we continue to fight, China will obviously go bankrupt, and Britain will have no pressure.
A country's financial capacity best represents its national strength. Any national capability, including military strength, is inseparable from the support of financial resources, and fiscal revenues are more representative of a country's strength than the total GDP.
Some people are surprised: China is a big country, Britain is a small country, and China's area is not known how many times that of Britain. At that time, China's population was 410 million, Britain's was 15 million, and Britain's fiscal revenue was actually four times that of China.
There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, the national income of China and the United Kingdom is different, and long before the Industrial Revolution, the average British was much richer than Chinese. On the other hand, and more importantly, is the tax capacity of both countries.
On the face of it, the British political system is not conducive to taxation, because we all know the British concept of "no representation, no tax". The main element of the famous Glorious Revolution was to limit the power of the king, who could not collect taxes without the consent of Parliament.
The Chinese emperor was rich all over the world, there was no limit to the imperial power, and there was a huge number of bureaucrats, and one of the main tasks was to collect the imperial grain and state tax on the emperor's behalf. In this way, China's tax collection capacity should be much stronger than that of britain.
However, the opposite is true. It was precisely because of the Glorious Revolution that Britain's taxation ability was greatly enhanced, while the Chinese emperor's ability to collect taxes has always been very poor. Why? The reason is simple.
The Glorious Revolution emphasized the protection of property rights, and the king could no longer arbitrarily harm the interests of taxpayers, let alone use the taxes he received to eat and drink extravagantly, just like the Qin Emperor Han Wu, the palace was built dozens or hundreds of times.
One of the main achievements of the Glorious Revolution was that the tax system was no longer under the control of the king, but by parliament, and every sum of money was openly debated and very transparent. In this way, the shrewd Englishman believed that his money would not be enriched or wasted, but would eventually be spent on himself to improve the welfare of his citizens.
It turned out that after the Glorious Revolution, although Britain's national strength continued to grow and its revenues continued to increase, the Expenditure of the British Government on domestic management remained largely unchanged. In other words, the ranks of civilian officials are relatively incorruptible and frugal, and tax revenues are not swallowed up by corruption.
Externally, the British government, although it spent the highest tax revenue in the world at that time, also most effectively protected British interests. Through military force, Britain not only ensured the absolute security of the British Isles and the North American colonies, but also prevented any possible competitor on the European continent. Despite the war, Britain continued to win and could be compensated, and war spending stimulated economic growth and made the British economy more prosperous.
People's investment in the government is cost-effective, and they believe that by handing the state a pound, the state will return more to itself, which also makes there is little resistance to taxation in Britain. It is precisely because of this that the power that was first restrained and restricted in the world became the most effective and powerful power, and britain's national capacity was greatly enhanced.
As for the Chinese emperor, on the surface, the ability to collect taxes was very strong, and during the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, he plundered the wealth of the people through taxation at will, resulting in tens of millions of people becoming slaves. For example, in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, the state arbitrarily increased the three salaries, and no one could oppose it. In fact, however, China's fiscal capacity has always been poor.
Why?
First, in the eyes of ordinary people, taxation is the robbery of the people by the government, and the enthusiasm for paying taxes is not high, and every effort is made to evade taxes.
Second, and more importantly, because corruption cannot be effectively controlled, very little of the taxes collected through the bureaucracy are actually delivered to the central government, and 80 percent, or even 90 percent, are embezzled by officials at all levels, becoming the main means for officials to get rich.
Therefore, it can be said that the UK's ability to collect taxes smoothly is an important reason for its strong financial capacity. In addition, there is a more important reason, that is, the United Kingdom can issue a large number of government bonds, on this point Xiao Yun will analyze with you in future articles.