Her Dynasty

By ORVILLE SCHELL

EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI
The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
By Jung Chang
Illustrated. 436 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

Empress Dowager Cixi in the gardens of the Summer Palace.

For historians, there is no more powerful aphrodisiac than an exciting topic buoyed by a raft of unexploited sources, raising the prospect of a revisionist look at an important figure or even an entire era. 

There are few leaders in modern Chinese history more layered with prejudice begging to be stripped away than Cixi, the dowager empress who ruled China for almost half a century until her death in 1908. 

For decades, she was condescendingly referred to in the West as “the Old Buddha,” the “She Dragon,” the usurper of a throne “over whose disintegration she presided.”

Jung Chang, author of the acclaimed memoir “Wild Swans” and a co-author of the contentious biography “Mao: The Unknown Story,” has set out to reverse such negative verdicts. 

In her absorbing new book, she laments that Cixi has for so long been “deemed either tyrannical and vicious, or hopelessly incompetent — or both.” 

Far from depicting her subject as a sinister conservative who obstructed reforms, Chang portrays Cixi as smart, patriotic and open-minded. 

In her view, the empress was a proto-feminist who, despite the narrow-minded, misogynistic male elite that made up the imperial bureaucracy, “brought medieval China into the modern age.” 

Chang concludes that Cixi was an “amazing stateswoman,” a “towering” figure to whom “the last hundred years have been most unfair.”
While Chang’s admiration can approach hagiography, her extensive use of new Chinese sources makes a strong case for a reappraisal. 

Although there have been many histories, diaries and documentary collections of Cixi’s historical era published in Chinese, far fewer studies have appeared in English. 

Since none have made use of a full range of sources in both languages, there has been no truly authoritative account of Cixi’s rule. 

Her story is both important and evocative.
Brought to the Forbidden City in 1852 at age 16 as an imperial concubine, she was forced to flee Beijing in 1860 with the Xianfeng emperor as Western forces approached to loot and burn the magnificent Summer Palace. 

This desecration during the Second Opium War was designed, as the British commander, Lord Elgin, put it, to crush the “emperor’s pride as well as his feelings.” 

However, in Chang’s retelling, despite Cixi’s indignation at foreign treatment of China, she quickly discerned “the dead end” into which the country “had been rammed” by the emperor’s “all-consuming hatred” of foreigners and “the closed-door policy” of the previous century. 

By the time the emperor died in 1861, says Chang, Cixi had come to understand the urgent necessity of reform, of opening up to the outside world. 

Soon thereafter she launched a coup against the conservative Confucian regency, intent on taking power herself. 

Making China strong, she wrote, “is the only way to ensure that foreign countries will not start a conflict against us... or look down on us.” 

Over the following decades, she sought to guide China’s new efforts at what came to be known as “self-strengthening.”
Beset by revolt from within and incursion from without, the dynasty’s system of governance was gravely stressed during the second half of the 19th century. 

Moreover, traditional Confucian political culture held it unacceptable for a woman to rule, so Cixi was forced not only to sit behind a screen during imperial audiences but to govern indirectly in the name of young male heirs. 

She was, as one courtier derisively put it, like “a hen crowing in the morning, which is bound to herald a disastrous day.” 

Only able to pick her way forward gingerly, as if “through a minefield,” she was, nonetheless, able to put her understandable anger at Western arrogance aside and recognize, as she put it, the West’s “ability to make their countries rich and strong.” 

In Chang’s view, despite all her shortcomings and obstacles, Cixi became a strategically astute and successful reformer.
After her son came of age, she did turn the throne over to him, and when his successor, her adopted son, the Guangxu emperor, came of age she retired to her sumptuous new Summer Palace. 

It was only when he became infatuated with a group of radical reformers, Chang writes, and began issuing a series of decrees that deeply antagonized other officials that Cixi engineered another coup and returned to power, to rule until her death. 

But, Chang argues, Cixi governed with an impressive aplomb and authority that belied the prejudice so many foreigners continued to harbor against her.
Much of this ongoing distrust emanated from the debacle that ensued when, swayed by resentment against foreign pressure, Cixi decided to ally the dynasty with an anti-Christian, anti-foreign cult known as the Boxers. 

Widespread attacks on missionaries and diplomats led to another foreign occupation of Beijing. 

Although not entirely her fault, the Boxer Rebellion was, of all her failures, the most disastrous. 

But, as Robert Hart, the former British consular official who ended up serving for decades as inspector general of Chinese maritime customs, reported, “It is not China that is falling to pieces: it is the powers that are pulling her to pieces!” 

Indignant at the endless foreign intrusions, Cixi issued an emotional decree calling on all officials “to fight those hateful enemies” and never speak of appeasement or “even think about it.”
When an expeditionary force arrived to rescue the besieged foreign legations of Beijing, China was again humiliatingly bested. 

Yet the empress was nonetheless able to recognize the folly of further resistance and even issued a “Decree of Self-Reproach” blaming her own poor judgment for the catastrophe. 

In another decree, she enjoined her subjects to recognize that “only by adopting what is superior about the foreign countries can we rectify what is wanting in China.” 

Over the remaining years, she instituted a series of ever more radical reforms, but despite a charm offensive aimed at the diplomatic corps, the Boxer Rebellion remained an indelible black mark against her.
What makes reading this new biography so provocative are the similarities between the challenges faced by the Qing court a century ago and those confronting the Chinese Communist Party today. 

While foreign incursion is no longer a threat and China’s economic situation is far more advanced, the present government’s survival depends once again on its ability to implement major internal reforms. 

Like the Empress Dowager, President Xi Jinping finds himself confronting a daunting choice: 

Change too slowly and risk foundering. 

Change too rapidly and risk losing control.
By the time Cixi finally embraced constitutional monarchy, China’s ancien regime was too weak to save. Since then, the Chinese have undergone a dramatic series of efforts at self-reinvention. 

What the next act will look like is still far from clear. 

Now that the once revolutionary Chinese Communist Party has become the ancien regime, its leaders find themselves confronting the challenge of defending rather than overthrowing the status quo. 

Whether they can initiate the kinds of reforms needed to reposition China and spare their latter-day dynasty from a fate similar to that of the Qing is anyone’s guess. 

It is, however, the question that again animates China’s epic historical drama, and there is much to learn here from the experiences of Empress Dowager Cixi.