While the future of the empire was being forged in the mud and industry of Tianjin, its past was plotting its revenge in the perfumed, silent mansions of Beijing. The conservative faction, led by Prince Chun and the disgraced Grand Councillor Ronglu, had been politically shattered by the new regency's blitzkrieg of reforms. Their first line of resistance—the comfortable, time-honored tradition of bureaucratic sabotage—had been brutally crushed by the public trial and arrest of Treasurer Ma. The message had been clear: obstruct the new order, and you will be broken.
They now understood that they were not fighting a conventional political battle against Prince Gong. They were fighting something far more terrifying: a ruthlessly efficient, centralized power that moved with a speed and purpose the Qing court had not seen in a century.
That evening, in a secret meeting held in Prince Chun's residence, the mood was one of bitter resentment and a dawning, desperate fear. The air was thick with the smoke of expensive tobacco and the stench of wounded pride.
"They are not just reforming the state," Prince Chun said, his voice a low, angry growl. He was a man who believed deeply in the sacred hierarchy, in the innate superiority of Manchu rule and the perfection of ancestral tradition. He saw the new edicts not as progress, but as sacrilege. "They are tearing it down, root and branch, and replacing it with this… barbarian monstrosity of steam and steel."
Grand Councillor Ronglu, a man whose entire career had been built on navigating the subtle currents of court intrigue, now found himself completely outmaneuvered. He saw the new regime with a clarity born of pure hatred.
"We cannot stop them with memorials in the Council," he said, his voice thin and reedy. "They have the seals. They have the treasury. They will simply arrest anyone who stands in their way, brand them as corrupt, and seize their assets to fund their next mad project. We are fighting a tyrant who wears a child's face."
An elderly Manchu duke, his face deeply lined, shook his head in despair. "Then what is to be done? Do we simply stand by and watch them dismantle everything our ancestors built?"
"No," Ronglu whispered, a cunning, venomous light entering his eyes. "If we cannot fight their decrees, then we will fight their ideas. If we cannot stop the river, then we will poison the very soil in which they are trying to plant their barbarian seeds."
A new strategy began to coalesce in the room, a plan far more insidious and potentially far more damaging than simple bureaucratic obstruction. It was a strategy of cultural and ideological warfare.
"Their power comes from the perception of success," Ronglu explained, leaning forward, his voice a conspiratorial hiss. "They must be seen to be improving the empire. We must ensure that every one of their 'modernizations' is seen by the common people as a curse, not a blessing."
Their plan was to attack not the reforms themselves, but the very concept of reform. They would use their deep, entrenched influence over the traditional institutions of the empire—the Confucian academies that educated the gentry, the local Buddhist and Daoist temples that guided the spiritual lives of the peasants, the powerful clan associations that governed village life—to sow a potent crop of fear, superstition, and xenophobia.
First, they would target the new Imperial Military Academy in Tianjin. "We will use our allies in the Censorate and the academies to spread the word," Prince Chun declared. "The foreign instructors they hire are not teachers; they are spies, sent to learn our military weaknesses. The curriculum they teach is not strategy; it is a barbarian philosophy that teaches disrespect for the ancestors and contempt for the classics. The graduates of this academy will not be loyal Qing officers; they will be 'fake Chinese,' with Western minds in Chinese bodies, their loyalty pledged not to the Dragon Throne, but to their foreign masters."
Next, they would attack the industrial projects, the mines and factories. "The common people are simple," Ronglu said with a dismissive sneer. "They understand the spirits of the earth and the harmony of the elements better than they understand steam engines. We will have the local priests and soothsayers explain the truth to them. These new iron mines are not a source of wealth; they are deep wounds cut into the earth's dragon veins. The smoke from the factory chimneys is not a sign of progress; it is a foul pestilence that will poison the crops and anger the heavens. Every flood, every drought, every failed harvest from now on will be laid at the feet of these new projects. We will frame their industrial accidents not as technical failures, but as heavenly punishments for their hubris."
Finally, they would attack the foreigners themselves, the tangible symbols of this unwanted change. "We will subtly stoke the embers of hatred for the foreign devils," Prince Chun said, his voice cold. "We will spread tales, through the teahouses and the marketplaces, of their arrogance, their strange customs, their contempt for our ways. We will create a grassroots movement of anti-foreign sentiment. Let us see how willing Li Hongzhang's German engineers are to work when they are cursed in the streets and their local workers begin to desert them out of fear of divine retribution."
It was a long-term, deeply cynical, and potentially devastating plan. They were no longer trying to stop Ying Zheng's projects directly. They were trying to make them culturally and socially impossible to implement. They would turn the hearts and minds of the common people against the very idea of modernization, using tradition, religion, and fear as their weapons. They would portray the reformers not as saviors, but as heretics, and the Emperor not as a visionary, but as a foolish child leading the empire down a path to ruin.
The conservative faction had found its new purpose. They would be the guardians of the old ways, the defenders of the faith. They would fight their war not in the council chambers, but in the temples and villages, a whispering campaign of poison designed to ensure that the new era, so hopefully begun in the mud of Tianjin, would die a slow, agonizing death, choked by the weeds of tradition.