Talk:Nanyang Fleet

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Military history: Maritime / Asian / Chinese C‑class

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Internal politics

It would be helpful to include some information about the internal politics of the Qing Empire in the Beiyang, Fujian, Guangdong, Nanyang fleet articles, that the fleets and armies under their command were the political tools of individual mandarins and groups of mandarins. That these fleets and armies represented a considerable "personal" investment of revenue and prestige that was used to leverage influence at court, and that these power groups were loath to see their investments and therefore influence diminished by war damage, leading to the situation were more often than not they refused requests for reinforcements from each other. KTo288 (talk) 09:15, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dear KTo288,

I entirely agree with you. Perhaps the best way to do it would be to insert a paragraph like yours, only going into more detail on individual power struggles, in a more general article on the Chinese Navy. Having created an article on the French Far East Squadron during the Sino-French War, I would like to balance it with an equivalent article (or section of an article, as I'm sure one already exists) on the Chinese Navy. In the meantime, your paragraph is a useful way of prefacing specific examples of non-cooperation. I think I say something broadly similar in the concluding paragraph of the article Battle of Fuzhou. Maybe, for a start, that paragraph could be strengthened along the lines you suggest.

Djwilms (talk) 03:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've just looked at the article Battle of Fuzhou and have added a statement along the lines you suggest to the final paragraph. I'll quote my source as the Cambridge History of China, unless you happen to have another, better source to hand.

Djwilms (talk) 03:46, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]