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The Beiyang Fleet was formally established on December 17, 1888 (the 14th year of Emperor Guangxu's reign) at Liugong Island in Weihaiwei, Shandong. The Qing government allocated 4 million taels of silver every year for naval construction. The fleet was once the strongest in Asia and the ninth in the world (the top eight were Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Spain, Ottoman Turkey, Italy, and the United States according to the ranking of the U.S. Naval Yearbook of that year). It was a modern naval fleet established by China and also the strongest and largest of the four modern navies established by the Qing Dynasty. There were 25 main warships, 50 auxiliary warships, 30 transport ships, and more than 4,000 officers and soldiers.

Looking back on the past, compared with China's miserable history of poverty, weak military and suffering from foreign invasions in modern times, the Chinese Navy has suffered three devastating blows and each time it had to be rebuilt almost from scratch.

The first blow was the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. After the Battle of the Yellow Sea and the Battle of Weihaiwei, the Beiyang Navy, which the Qing government had painstakingly built up for many years, was almost wiped out. Admiral Ding Ruchang committed suicide by taking poison. The remaining warships Zhenyuan, Jiyuan, Pingyuan, Guangping, Zhendong, Zhenxi, Zhennan, Zhenbei, Zhenzhong, and Zhenbian were all captured by the Japanese army and became trophies. Japan only left behind a disarmed training ship, the Kangji, for the surrendered Qing officers and soldiers to take the coffins of Ding Ruchang and others away.

When the Qing government learned of the defeat, it had not yet figured out a way to continue fighting Japan, but hastily blamed the "navy for failing the country" and issued an edict declaring that "at present everything is not yet complete, and the government has no pending matters. We propose to temporarily suspend the staff and funds on duty to save money." The Ministry of Naval Affairs was directly abolished, and the remaining officers were either dismissed or investigated, making the Beiyang Navy the culprit of the defeat identified by the rulers, and its organization disappeared.

It was not until 1896 that the Qing government began to consider training naval talents and purchasing new ships. The Governor-General of Fujian and Zhejiang, Bian Baoquan, also petitioned to reorganize the Shipbuilding Bureau and made a bitter comparison between China and Japan: "Most of Japan's current ruling ministers studied in the same class as our first batch of students who went abroad. Are Chinese students inferior in qualifications?" Unfortunately, although Chinese students were not inferior in talent, the Qing government, which was overwhelmed by the heavy indemnity, no longer had the extra funds and energy to rebuild the navy.

Although the Qing government set up the Navy Department in 1907 and upgraded it to the Navy Department in 1910 in an attempt to restore the glory of the navy, the burden of the Boxer Indemnity made the Qing Dynasty powerless. Scholar Ma Youyuan once estimated that from 1895 to the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the Qing government only purchased 39 warships with a displacement of 34,728 tons; and built 24 warships with a total displacement of 10,564 tons. On the other hand, Japan, which squeezed huge indemnities from China, used its windfall to build the "Six-Six Fleet" and the "Eight-Eight Fleet" successively. One of the battleships, the Fuji, had a displacement of more than 12,000 tons. This overwhelming contrast is full of blood, tears and humiliation in modern China.

After the Republic of China, the Navy Department of the Beiyang Government put forward the "Shipbuilding Plan" with great hope, and took Japan as the benchmark: "At the very least, we must strive to be on par with the nearest and strongest neighboring country in order to be ranked among the powerful countries." The General Staff also submitted the "First Shipbuilding Plan and Reasons for the Third to Tenth Year of the Republic of China", planning to build a magnificent fleet of 162 new warships including battle cruisers, reconnaissance ships, torpedo destroyers, submarines, etc., with a total displacement of more than one million tons before 1920, but the reality of poverty still cruelly crushed this ideal. Before the Northern Expedition of the National Revolutionary Army, the Beiyang Government only added 17 ships, and almost all of them were shallow-water gunboats of more than 200 tons.

Although the Nationalist government completed the Northern Expedition and formally unified China, its situation was not much better. Even though it had formulated a draft to build 600,000 tons of ships within 15 years, it was ultimately unable to implement it due to financial difficulties. When the September 18th Incident broke out in 1931, the Navy Department believed that "if our navy wants to fight Japan at sea, it must have at least 70% of its navy"; on the eve of the July 7th Incident in 1937, the Nationalist government's General Staff and the Navy Department could only sadly judge that "in order to prevent enemy ships from penetrating deep into the hinterland and landing at will, in addition to army defense and air force bombing, it depends on underwater defense. Underwater defenses include mines, strong cables, rafts, chains, anti-nets, sunken ships, etc., and mainly wired mines and machine mines", and completely abandoned the idea of ​​using the navy to counter Japan. After all, Japan already had 285 warships in service at the time, with a total displacement of an astonishing 1.153 million tons, while the Chinese Navy had only 118 ships totaling 68,000 tons, which was completely incomparable.

Therefore, with such a huge disadvantage, the weak Chinese Navy ushered in the second devastating blow of the Anti-Japanese War. In order to preserve its strength and delay the advancement of the Japanese army, the National Government could only order all ships to be concentrated in the Yangtze River to sweep the enemy and hand over the sea control; then several ships and civilian ships were sunk in Dongjiadu, Shanghai, Jiangyin Waterway and Qingdao, Shandong, and then combined with mine blockades, hoping to stop the Japanese army from going up the Yangtze River. Under this tragic tactic, the Chinese Navy was almost completely destroyed. The naval officers and soldiers who had no ships to fight were ordered to form a mine-laying guerrilla team, responsible for guerrilla warfare and laying mines behind enemy lines. Although the guerrillas blew up 135 Japanese ships of various sizes and caused more than 5,000 Japanese casualties, it did not help the overall situation. However, this still fully demonstrated the heroic will of the Chinese Navy to fight against the big with the small.

After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, China was given the right to draw lots to distribute Japanese warships as spoils of war, and had several more destroyers to strengthen its military strength. However, due to the lack of maintenance resources and the fact that most of the weapons of these spoils of war had been dismantled, they were unable to form effective combat power.

Finally, when the Chinese People's Liberation Army established its first naval force in Taizhou, Jiangsu on April 23, 1949, it only had 183 large and small ships captured, surrendered, and abandoned by the Kuomintang government, with a displacement of 43,268 tons. Many of them were unable to fight due to poor performance and lack of parts. The rest of the navy followed the Kuomintang to retreat to the islands of Taiwan and Penghu. The PLA could only recruit civilian ships or backward sampans to carry soldiers in many island-grabbing battles. In 1950, Xiao Jinguang, the first commander of the PLA Navy, had to rent fishing boats to patrol Liugong Island, which shows how embarrassing the Chinese Navy was at that time.

Compared with the long-term weakness over the past 100 years, the Chinese navy no longer needs to retreat to the inland rivers to avoid war and sink, but can instead head straight to the deep ocean. And most importantly, for China, which has suffered from the invasion of European and American powers, building a strong army is only for self-defense and to avoid the recurrence of national tragedies.