Cixi was neither a reformer nor a reactionary — she just wanted the Qing to survive
She backed the Self-Strengthening Movement, founded the Imperial University, abolished the civil service exams — provided those reforms did not threaten the dynasty or her own power. The moment reform edged toward revolution, she turned on it.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
She climbed up from the sixth rank of concubine
Cixi was Manchu, and her father was a mid-to-lower-ranking official in the Jiangnan region. Because she was Manchu, she could be sent into the palace to take part in the selection of consorts; Han women had no such eligibility. The imperial harem was divided into eight ranks, and she entered at the sixth — a very low starting point. But she bore the Xianfeng Emperor his only son, and her status rose immediately. Yang Wen says her core trait was that she was ‘too good at politics’ — interested in power, interested in personal relationships, and skilled at manipulating people. She was not the empress; the empress had to come from a genuinely aristocratic Manchu family, so her only route upward was to attract the emperor's attention.
— Yang WenShe joined with Prince Gong to force the eight regents to death
The day before the Xianfeng Emperor died, he appointed eight regents, charging them with drafting edicts and making decisions collectively, making them the centre of power after the emperor's death. But Cixi was also given the power to seal edicts with the imperial seal, and she was deeply unhappy with this arrangement. So she joined forces with another empress dowager who also held sealing power, Ci'an, and with the key figure Prince Gong, to force the eight regents to commit suicide, ultimately eliminating them. This was the Xinyou Coup of 1861, when Cixi was not yet thirty. Rana Mitter points out that when the coup took place, the Taiping Rebellion would not be put down for another three years, and that through this coup Cixi pushed herself to the very front of power.
— Ronald PoTwo child emperors gave her room to operate
In the history of Chinese dynasties, a woman actually taking the throne was taboo; the only exception was Wu Zetian of the Tang. So a woman who wanted power had to find a way to operate behind the emperor. Rana Mitter points out that one accidental reason Cixi managed this so successfully at the end of the 19th century was the consecutive appearance of two child emperors — one five years old, the other about eight — neither yet of an age to rule in person. This gave her far more opportunity than she would have had facing a twenty-one-year-old or a forty-one-year-old emperor. Yang Wen adds that being a woman was actually an advantage: when she approached officials and worked for her own interests or the dynasty's, she looked ‘harmless’, and officials did not think a woman could pose any threat.
— Rana MitterShe drove her own son to death at nineteen
Cixi was a control freak who tried to control the young Tongzhi Emperor, and the mother-son relationship was extremely turbulent. Tongzhi married at seventeen or eighteen and acquired an empress; by convention Cixi should then have handed over power, stopped ruling from behind the curtain, and let the emperor rule in person. But Tongzhi never learned how to be emperor, because his mother did everything for him. Yang Wen says there were rumours that Cixi wanted to arrange for a woman she favoured to be empress, but Tongzhi chose someone else, and Cixi kept watching whom he slept with. Tongzhi simply chose no one, went out, and contracted syphilis. The official diagnosis was smallpox, but Yang Wen says the real diagnosis was syphilis, and the two look alike in symptoms. To save the dynasty's face, Cixi is said to have ordered the imperial physicians to treat him for smallpox rather than syphilis, and so Tongzhi died.
— Yang WenThe defeat in 1895 cannot be blamed on her naval funds alone
Cixi has long been criticised over the First Sino-Japanese War, accused of diverting funds that should have supported the navy to build a new palace. Ronald Po argues this criticism needs a closer look: in the early years of the Self-Strengthening Movement, Cixi strongly supported building a modern navy and other modernisation projects, and only in the few years before the war did she want to retire behind the scenes and build a palace for her old age. So he judges that Cixi bears partial responsibility for losing the war, but that the Qing court also had structural problems — corruption, cronyism, inefficiency — that had existed for a long time, and responsibility cannot simply be pinned on one woman or one leader.
— Ronald PoPower had long been flowing from the court to the provinces
Rana Mitter stresses that in the last two or three decades of the 19th century, a great deal of power drained away from the Qing court. Because of the Taiping Rebellion, the court was forced to allow provincial governors like Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang to raise their own provincial armies — and a Chinese province could be the size of a European country. Military power shifted from centralisation to the localities, and the process that in the 20th century would be called warlordism began there. In the north there was a region called Beiyang, whose successive leaders would become an independent force, sometimes cooperating with the court in Beijing and sometimes openly opposing it. Rana says that from this angle, the fact that the court could still retain as much central power as it did while Cixi was in charge is in some sense a credit to her.
— Rana MitterOnce reform looked like revolution, she turned on it
During the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, Cixi initially supported or at least tolerated it. Rana Mitter says the specific reforms rolled out that summer and early autumn looked quite progressive, and most crucially, in 1898 the Imperial University was founded — the predecessor of today's Peking University, China's first modern university, teaching languages, science and other modern subjects rather than two thousand years of Confucian classics. Figures like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were brought in as a kind of think tank, proposing a constitutional monarchy and reshaping Confucian thought to make it more egalitarian. But when she felt the direction of reform was approaching revolution and making her uncomfortable, she pulled back at once and ordered the reformers arrested or exiled. Yang Wen argues she was neither a reformer nor a reactionary; she had only one goal: for the Qing to survive, and for her own power to continue.
— Rana MitterIn her last six years she did what she had refused four years earlier
After the Boxer crisis, the Western powers demanded an indemnity of 333 million US dollars, a devastating blow to Qing finances and one of the factors that helped bring the dynasty down. But in the last six years after 1902, until her death in 1908, Cixi instead supported many of the reforms she had rejected in 1898: a constitutional monarchy, locally elected assemblies, the abolition in 1905 of the civil service examination system that had lasted a thousand years, and the creation of modern educational institutions. Rana Mitter says these were ultimately implemented, and that one can say she did support modernisation in the final stage of her life. The problem was that it was too late — only three years after her death, the revolution in the south in 1911 brought the whole system down.
— Rana MitterIn their own words · checked verbatim
She was so political. She is interested in power. She is interested in human relationship. How do you manipulate people? She's very skilled in that, even before, probably, you know, when she was growing up.
Yang Wen9:14
In other words, they were not of an age when they could even think about ruling in their own right. And that meant the opportunity for a powerful person, in this case, a woman, Tzu-shi, was greater than it would have been if, say, the emperor had been 21 or 41 years old.
Rana Mitter16:32
For me, she's neither a reformer nor a conservative. Her goal is for the Qing dynasty to live on, for herself, her own power to go on.
Yang Wen33:59
At the same time, she was also keen to make sure that while reforms were encouraged, that they didn't overthrow the entire system.
Rana Mitter34:59
So it seems that she learned many of the lessons, but maybe learned them just a few years too late for them actually to be effective.
Rana Mitter41:26
If she hadn't done either of those things, it might just have been possible to turn China into a federalised constitutional monarchy, which is where it was ending up to some extent by the time of her death.
Rana Mitter43:26
Now, you could see why today's Communist Party might consider this as a lesson they do not want people to learn.
Rana Mitter50:43
Figures
| Age at which the Tongzhi Emperor died | 19 | 19:36 |
| Amount of the Boxer indemnity | 333 million US dollars | 40:16 |
| Year the civil service examination system was abolished | 1905 | 41:26 |
| Year Cixi died | 1908 | 41:26 |
| Year the Qing dynasty fell | 1911 | 41:26 |
| Estimated death toll of the Taiping Rebellion | 20 million to 30 million, with some mainland historians putting it close to 100 million | 10:16 |
| Year the Imperial University was founded | 1898 | 34:59 |
| Cixi's rank among the concubines when she entered the palace | Sixth of eight ranks | 8:12 |
Glossary
- self-strengthening movement
- The reform movement from 1861 in which some Qing officials promoted the study of Western mathematics, science and languages to strengthen China.
- Hundred Days Reform
- The radical reform pushed by Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and others in the summer and autumn of 1898, later halted by Cixi.
- Boxer Rebellion
- The 1900 anti-foreign movement in north China in which peasants used martial arts and magic to fight Westerners and Chinese Christians.
- Datong
- The ideal of ‘Great Harmony’ proposed by Kang Youwei, an attempt to combine traditional Chinese thought with modernisation.
- century of humiliations
- The narrative advanced by the government of the People's Republic of China referring to the series of humiliating defeats China suffered at the hands of the great powers in the 19th century.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in modern Chinese history and the paths of late-Qing political reform, especially readers who want to understand the structural question of why reform fails.
The opening background on the 1830s opium trade and the Opium War, which listeners already familiar with this history can skip.