Book Review: Jung Chang's "Empress Dowager Cixi"

{The last entry in a series belatedly continuing the celebration of Women's History Month, this week's entry will take a look at a controversial historical figure, Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi, whose life is chronicled in a 2013 biography by Jung Chang. Chang is an author of Chinese descent who currently lives in London as a British citizen.}

Historical nonfiction can make for dry reading. Many books try to be as comprehensive as possible, ignoring the individual trees in favor of the looking at the whole forest, in order to get a better understanding of the various forces at work during a specific time period in history. It is preferable then when a book can balance both an exploration of historical forces and the people caught up in them, so as to keep the reader both anchored and interested. In my opinion, English writer Jung Chang's biography of the Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi in her 2013 biography titled Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China succeeds for the most part in achieving this balance. In the process, the reader is introduced into the life of one of the more controversial Chinese leaders, the penultimate in a long line of empresses, whose tale of political intrigue contributes greatly to our understanding of Chinese modernization. In addition, with greater access to both Chinese and English sources, the author forces us to confront traditional portrayals of the Empress as a conservative force opposed to reform.

Cixi's tale evoked for me a corollary to that of fictional character Cersei Lannister from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series in the way that the former elevates herself into a position of power in the patriarchal Qing dynasty. Starting off as just a teenage concubine in 1852, one of many that the Emperor (in this case Emperor Xianfeng) kept after a long selection process, Cixi was interested in affairs of state and politics, both long considered masculine domains. Like Cersei, Cixi lived in a period in which female leadership in the public sphere was frowned upon, forcing her to take indirect measures to access the domains of power, slowly building up influence by networking first with the other women and the eunuchs of the court (lest she acted assertively enough to give people the impression she was the next Empress Wu Zetian, who had historically been seen as seizing power and ruling illegitimately). For example, as she rose through the ranks to the near-top by giving birth to a son on April 26, 1856, she entered into an important partnership with then Empress Zhen in her quest to reform her country, which she feared was falling behind the Western world. 

The Opium Wars of 1839-1860 in which the British and their allies violated Chinese sovereignty and forcefully opened Chinese markets to trade was a powerful factor in her behind-the-scenes coup when she was in exile at the Summer Palace with Emperor Xianfeng. It was at the Summer Palace that her policy of "Make China Strong" (sound familiar?) began to take shape. In a series of Machiavellian maneuvers, Cixi was able to gain control over the process of Xianfeng's deathbed naming of his successor (Cixi's son Tongzhi) and the approving of imperial decrees away from a Council of Regents she regarded as wanting to continue the isolationist hardliner status quo of the previous century. This policy had nearly ruined the country and made it just another colonial outpost of the West or Japan, which had overwhelming naval power it threatened to use to occupy parts of China in the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Ruling indirectly through the male heirs (as Cersei does with her sons as Regent), first with her son and then her adopted son Guangxu and through cooperation with other high-ranking (read: male) members of the court and royal family, Cixi oversaw China's diplomatic and economic opening to the West and set the groundwork for the development of modern China's extensive rail network and military build-up.

However, like the current period of globalization and the backlashes against its universalist values, internal tensions over the intrusion of Western values into the traditional Confucian value system naturally erupted and threatened the dynasty. Various attempts to contain these forces of dissent weren't perfect, especially when in 1899-1901, under pressure from popular discontent over the reach of Western missionaries, the dynasty allied itself with xenophobic and anti-Christian segments of Chinese society to disastrous results. Beijing was once again put under foreign occupation. Dynastic support of the Boxers in an ill-advised attempt to hold off another foreign invasion damaged her reputation both domestically and abroad, damage that wouldn't be undone when she again seized power after the death of her adopted son, who was sympathetic to radical reformers who may or may not have been associated with imperial Japanese intelligence officers who sought a hostile reunification (to form a Pan-Asian nation, supervised by Japan). Recognizing the unsustainable foreign and domestic pressures resulting from the uneven, incremental opening of China, Cixi, at this point nearing the end of her life, devoted her remaining political clout towards cementing dynastic legitimacy through the introduction of a constitutional monarchy and the vote to the masses.

At this point, in the early 20th centuries, it became clear that the dynasty could no longer be sustained. Factions long-held in check by Cixi, such as the Boxers and those who sought a full-fledged republic (whether Communist or otherwise) were unleashed upon Cixi's death in 1908. The resulting political turmoil precipitated the abdication of the last emperor (then 5 years old) by the last empress, Longyu, in 1912, which created a Chinese republic. Since then, a series of reformist experiments have led to the present, in which the Communist Party seems to have become a new dynasty of sorts, their legitimacy similarly seen in terms of being able to maintain modernist reforms and guarantee continuing prosperity in an era of globalization and backlash to its pressures. (In a way, modern China owes much to Cixi, despite all her flaws and miscalculations, like that during the Boxer Revolution. Even with critical accusations of perhaps toeing the line dividing true consideration of new historical sources from historical revisionism, a point which I could see at certain points of the book-such as the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Cixi's adopted son and her second coup-Chang nevertheless does make a point for reconsidering Cixi's historical image as a conservative tyrant.)

As the saying goes, while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes. It will be interesting to see if modern China continues down the path that the Empress Dowager set for it and how it handles the tumultuous twenty-first century. In any case, Chang's biography of Empress Dowager Cixi provides valuable lessons for general readers and policymakers alike in her detailing of the historical challenges China faced in the 18th-19th centuries and that it and other developing countries (and perhaps even developed countries) continue to face today.

Works Cited:

Chang, Jung. (2013). Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. New York: Anchor Books.

Frankel, Valerie Estelle. (2014). Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity and Resistance. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers.