Name: Empress Dowager Cixi
Rating: 3.833333333333333 (9 reviews)
ISBN: 9780307271600

Jung Chang

A portrait of the nineteenth-century empress covers the coup that made her regent after her father's death, her defiance of centuries of traditions and formalities, and her role in introducing Western political ideas and technologies.

The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

Empress Dowager Cixi

Tim Pendry

A largely entertaining and informative account of the Manchu Empress Dowager Cixi who was the guiding force in China during the era in which it was most under direct pressure from the West to modernise. Part of Jung Chan's mission is to rehabilitate Cixi from historical criticism and to a great extent she succeeds in restoring some balance. However, she goes too far, almost certainly because Jung Chang is something of a liberal-conservative and wants to think the best of a fellow woman - you have to see the book through this gender prejudice. A more considered opinion is that Cixi was a highly intelligent woman who knew how to play the peculiar anthropology of imperial political rule for traditionalist ends - but those ends were absurd. She was a naturally gifted ruler amongst traditionalist fools, largely male by the nature of things, in an inherently corrupt and feudal system that had ceased to be able to protect its own people. The insights into the international politics of the era are useful in understanding modern tensions and there are no surprises. The British had matured into patronising assistants to the local ruler much as they did in India, the French were opportunists, the Germans were little more than global thugs and the Japanese had a plan ... The role of the Japanese in destabilising China is well articulated here and it is clear both that they had many allies within China, traditionalist and revolutionary, and were extremely clever. The Japanese aim might simply be summarised as to rule China by replacing the Manchus on the basis that the Han Chinese and tributaries would not care if one set of foreigners replaced another. Much that drives the fierce Chinese nationalist response today to Japan can be traced back to the politics of the 1890s onwards. This reached its natural end with the invasion of China in the 1930s. America comes out well as a non-patronising friend of China and as a sensitive moderniser. It is no accident that non-Communist Chinese nationalism eventually orientated itself towards the US. The more one reads of history, the more the US appears to be the best of nations except when it becomes obsessed by ideological bugaboos - whether communist or 'terrorist'. Cixi herself has a story of three parts - influential in opening up China to the West, then making serious mistakes in trying to challenge it and, finally, too late, being a force for constitutional monarchy. Jung Chang occasionally errs in trying 'clean' Cixi's reputation beyond credibility - the constraints of Imperial practice may have obligated cruelties but cruelties there were. If we think that there was a possibility of a foreign imperial and obscurantist dictatorship based on humiliation being transformed from within to make China strong, then Cixi might be regarded as 'heroic'. Regrettably the whole imperial project was absurd once greedy forces with superior technology emerged. Cixi's constant ducking and diving to preserve a political corpse strikes me as often just self interest. Stories of women in power before the modern age are always fascinating, precisely because they tell us so much not about 'patriarchy' but about how the clever can always work a system. We should get out of the malign modern habit of being impressed with such women without any serious analysis of the system they command - whether Byzantium or China. What we have here is not a world dominated by men as such but one ruled by small cliques with a history whose mentality is that of thieves who will hang together lest they hang separately. The bottom line is that China was trapped in a weak economy surrounded by technologically superior enemies and arriving at that situation was precisely down to traditionalism and magical thinking. Empress Dowager Cixi did little more than permit a jaded system to survive for long enough that its degeneracy had become clear to everyone but the most ignorant peasant. Perhaps that was a major achievement of sorts.

Anyaconda

This was interesting and exactly how I like my historical non-fiction. Very easy to read.

Empress Dowager Cixi The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

Reviews

Highlights