Was This Powerful Chinese Empress a Feminist Trailblazer?

By Jane Perlez
The Hall of Dispelling Clouds at Empress Cixi’s Summer Palace in Beijing. It was renovated in 1895 for her 60th birthday extravaganza.
BEIJING — She entered the world of an ancient empire as a teenage concubine, chosen by the emperor to share his bed for her good looks, immaculate comportment and, above all, her ability to sing.
The male-dominated court was a swirl of intrigue, forced suicides and poisonings. 

Eunuchs assigned to the emperor prepared her for sex with the ruler, undressing her and carrying her to his bed. 

After the Emperor Xianfeng’s death, she governed in the name of young male heirs — from behind a screen.
Perhaps as an escape from these oppressive restrictions, Empress Dowager Cixi (pronounced TSIH-shee), the de facto ruler of China in the final decades of the imperial dynasty, rebuilt a fantastic wonderland, the Summer Palace. 

It’s an extended estate of glittery lakes, luxurious gardens and elaborate wooden pavilions on the edge of the nation’s capital, attracting up to 100,000 visitors a day.
Most of them are curious Chinese from across the country who read in their Communist Party-authorized school books that Cixi was a harridan who stole the nation’s wealth and was responsible for China’s humiliating defeat by the Japanese in 1895.
But was she? 

Cixi, a peer of Queen Victoria’s and apparently iron-willed, has invited revisionist interpretations that view her as a feminist, at least in the context of the late 19th century, when women in China were treated little better than spittoons.

The view from the Tower of Buddhist Incense.
Strong women in China are often portrayed as power-hungry, and sometimes irrational, and are notably absent from the highest ranks of government. 

There is no Hillary Clinton figure in contemporary China (the real Mrs. Clinton is vilified by the government for talking about human rights in the country), or an Angela Merkel, who has stood up to China on trade.
When Bo Xilai, a rival to the current ruler, Xi Jinping, was put on trial for corruption, he described his wife as “insane” in an effort to lessen his sentence.
So harking back to the pre-communist era for a feminist trailblazer makes sense. 

And to search for feminist ideals in a woman who ruled for nearly 50 years, from 1861 until her death in 1908, is understandable.
But the case of Cixi — who was isolated, undereducated and never made a break for personal freedom — is a hard argument to make.
A Chinese historian, Jung Chang, began the re-evaluation of Cixi with her biography, “Empress Dowager Cixi.” 

Ms. Chang, who lives in exile, argues the empress brought medieval China into the modern age, calling her an “amazing stateswoman.”
But Ms. Chang’s damn-the-man portrait of Cixi is a tad too generous even for some sympathizers. How could the empress dowager have ushered in groundbreaking innovation when much of her career was devoted to her drive to preserve the imperial family that crumbled three years after her death?
Empress Cixi, center, at the Wenchang Gallery of the Summer Palace. She was the last adult ruler of China’s imperial dynasty.

And Cixi did undermine a bold reform program begun by her adopted son, Emperor Guangxu, who favored a constitutional monarchy, not an absolute one. 

She then supported the Boxer rebellion, an anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising that cost China dearly, a move she later blamed on her bossy male advisers.
A Chinese scholar, Zhang Hongjie, recently took up the cause of the empress in a sympathetic essay, “Woman Cixi,” featured in an anthology about Chinese women and men who have struggled against the odds.
He argued that she was held back by her lack of education, a given at the time because she was a woman, and that she should be given credit for trying to make amends for her mistakes at the end of her rule. 

But Mr. Zhang said his positive portrait made little impact.
“Cixi is still a negative character,” he said.
Her endeavors to preserve the imperial family above all else make for comparisons with Michael Corleone, the fictional Mafia boss.
“She had one of the most ruthless, savvy political minds, she was like a gangster,” said Jeremiah Jenne, a historian who leads visitors on walking tours around the Summer Palace, where he points out 500-year-old juniper and cypress trees, and paint-faded pavilions like the Hall of Dispelling Clouds, which was renovated in 1895 for her 60th birthday extravaganza.
Cixi had the Summer Palace rebuilt after an invading European army looted and burned the original, which, with its jewel-encrusted furniture and over-the-top silks, was said to be on par with Versailles.
Chinese children have been taught that Empress Cixi stole money from the imperial navy to renovate the “marble boat” just two years before a war with the Japanese, which China lost.

Her reconstruction was not quite as opulent, but it was a sumptuous personal pleasure ground, intended to signify the strength of the family and its immense retinue of courtiers.
Despite the scholarly ruminations about Cixi, many Chinese tourists seem more interested in her extravagant lifestyle and come to see what is left of the loot, much faded because of neglect by the Communist Party’s cultural administrators.
A favorite is the “marble boat,” officially known as the Boat of Purity and Ease, a two-story wooden pavilion with wide verandas built into the side of the lakeshore and painted to resemble pale marble.
The official school curriculum says Cixi stole funds from the imperial navy to renovate the boat just two years before the outbreak of war with the Japanese. 

Because of her thievery, the textbooks say, China lost the naval battles against Japan in 1894.
Crowds, shoulder-to-shoulder on a recent spring day, pressed against the lakeside rail, taking selfies framed by the newly green willow trees that dipped into the water.
“She had an expensive lifestyle, and China had one disaster after another,” said a middle-aged primary-school teacher, who identified herself as Ms. Ye. 

She said she had no sympathy for Cixi.
Inside the Hall of Dispelling Clouds, where Empress Cixi celebrated her birthdays.

“When you are backward as China was then, people will take advantage of you,” she said.
In the gift shops, there are no images of Cixi, just a few pieces of pink silk emblazoned with her calligraphy, sold as wall hangings. 

Commemorative coins with the portrait of Mao Zedong, cheap bangles, tea sets and hand fans do a brisker trade.
“No one likes her,” one of the young saleswomen said. 

“In history she is bad. Who would buy souvenirs of Cixi?”
Young Chinese tourists showed more sympathy.
“As a woman, she couldn’t make decisions in politics like the men,” said Xiao Yangchuan, 18, a first-year university student. 

“I think we should see her as a real person. She has her own flaws, and we should understand her era,” she said.
In the last decade of her life, the empress dowager tried to polish her image by making herself more accessible, especially to Western diplomats. 

But in the end, she could barely overcome the impression that, like many royals in the West, she was most interested in her dogs, gardening and fancy clothing, wrote Sterling Seagrave in his empathetic biography, “Dragon Lady.”
Pictures of her are banished to a pavilion near the exit of the palace grounds, where a large sepia photo shows her, surrounded by ladies in waiting, dressed in an embroidered gown with pearls said to be the size of canary eggs, and long, talon-like fingernails.
The day before she died, the young emperor, Guangxu, was found dead — of natural causes, imperial records show. 

In 2008, Chinese medical investigators found extraordinarily high levels of arsenic in his remains, leading to a popular conclusion that the empress had killed him to try to stop him from introducing political reforms after her own death.
Did she do it? 

“I am going with Cixi,” said Mr. Jenne, the historian.
In her final years, she was known as the “old Buddha,” a term that friendly biographers say was a term of endearment. 

Others see it as an appropriately scornful term for a woman who was barely literate, left little for other women to emulate and led the bankrupt Qing dynasty to its downfall in a country whose government remains as male-dominated as ever.

Trickle-Down Censorship in China

An Interview with JFK Miller
By Susan Blumeberg-kason

I first became acquainted with JFK Miller through Whyiwrite.net, a site he founded and curates of interviews with authors who mainly write about China. 

Miller, an Australian, is a former expat of Indonesia, Singapore, and most recently, Shanghai, where he was editor-in-chief of an English magazine for more than six years. 

He returned to Brisbane in 2015 and recently published his first book, Trickle-Down Censorship: An Outsider’s Account of Working Inside China’s Censorship Regime (Hybrid Publishers, 2016). 

I recently asked him via e-mail about his years in China, censorship, and publishing.

SUSAN BLUMBERG-KASON: You mention in your book that many former expats in China have published memoirs after leaving the country. When you first thought about writing a memoir, was censorship the topic you wanted to tackle, or did you have other ideas? How did you decide to write about censorship?
JFK MILLER: Censorship was the only aspect of China on which I felt I could offer a perspective. 

I don’t speak terribly much Chinese — it’s quite pitiful actually — so I’m not acculturated in that sense. 

But with censorship I was immersed in it for six years. 

So I felt I knew it, in as much as you can know the rules of a system they go out of their way to keep secret. 

Though never for a moment did I think my situation was in any way comparable to that of a Chinese editor. They have to suffer censorship. 

For me, a foreigner, it was a lifestyle option. 

And not altogether a bad one because it afforded me a certain view of the country, to see it through a certain prism. 

In my part of the world [Australia] there’s no subject that’s taboo. 

We do have our sacred cows, but there’s nothing that can’t be spoken about. 

But the list of what’s verboten in China is extensive. 

Understanding what can’t be talked about is one way of understanding the place.

It’s fascinating to read about your meeting with your censors and how you suspect they might want China to open up, but all in due time. Does that give you hope, or do you think it will be too little, too late?
I have less hope today than when I lived there during the Hu-Wen administration, which seems a kinder, gentler time compared to now, imprisoned Nobel laureates notwithstanding. 

Xi Jinping’s quest to be the second coming of Deng Xiaoping must give serious pause to anyone hopeful of seeing a pluralist China in their lifetime. 

Today’s China is an ugly place if you’re a rights lawyer, grassroots activist, outspoken scholar, feminist or NGO worker. 

But, as Li Datong says, if you take into account 2,000 years of autocratic rule then to wait another 30 or so years for political reform isn’t so long a wait, particularly when you see how far China has progressed in this regard since it opened up. 

I hope he’s right, but I’m not so sure. 

The party has been remarkably effective at stymying calls for political reform. 

When Wen Jiabao made some promising remarks in this regard in the dying days of the last administration, state censors moved in to redact him. 

And he was the then premier no less.

You write briefly of the Hong Kong booksellers case. What were your first impressions when you heard about the booksellers? What is your prognosis for Hong Kong?
I don’t think it surprised anyone. 

The CCP is a practiced hand at intimidation. 

It should be — it has been silencing its critics this way for almost 70 years. 

And on that score you’d have to concede it’s been remarkably effective, both in Hong Kong and abroad. 

What interests me is how much we’ve all become like Hong Kong in that we self-censor for fear of upsetting Beijing. 

A good example is my own country’s 2013 Defense White Paper, which played down China’s growing militancy in our region. 

Quite a comedown from the previous 2009 paper, which had realistically acknowledged the threat. 

In journalism, there was Bloomberg’s self-censorship scandal of 2013, though I’m sure it’s not unique in this regard. 

I know the impulse to self censor all too well — I did it for six years. What has surprised me though is how far this impulse has spread abroad. 

As Orville Schell says, “We are all Hong Kong now.”

You didn’t write about foreign journalists and how in recent years many haven’t been able to renew their visas. But did you ever worry your visa wouldn’t be renewed?
Not really. 

Foreign journalists were in a different class from us low-rent scribes working for expat rags. 

None of us were employed as editors in any official capacity. 

Although I was editor-in-chief in every practical sense, the honorific title was held by my top censor. 

They didn’t have to worry about controlling us with visas because they controlled us with censorship. 

But foreign journalists write for foreign news outlets and are free to write what they like (self censorship permitting). 

So the only way to control them is to make the visa process bureaucratically hellish. 

And no one does red tape like the CCP.

It’s fascinating to read in your book that China has banned certain films and books, yet still allows those filmmakers and authors to speak at festivals on the mainland. What do you make of that? If China really wanted to censor them, wouldn’t they not permit them to speak at festivals and roam around China?
If they were serious undesirables there’s no way they would get a visa. 

I can’t imagine that anyone who’s even looked favorably in the direction of the Dalai Lama in living memory will be headlining a festival in China any time soon. 

But someone like Qiu Xiaolong, for instance, who writes detective fiction in which he often paints an unflattering portrait of the party and the society it has created, would occasionally fall foul of my censors. 

But I don’t think they mind — or perhaps even care — that he comes to town to appear at a few literary events attended mainly by foreigners. 

I also think it’s a matter of the left hand perhaps not knowing what the right hand is doing. 

Someone like Qiu might be on my censors’ radar, but not necessarily on immigration’s radar.

Your description of foreigners in China resonated with me. Why do you think some foreigners self-censor and don’t seem to acknowledge that, like most places in the world, unsavory things sometimes happen there?
I simply never understood those foreigners who saw the place through rose-colored glasses. 

China is a contradictory place, and I have contradictory feelings about it. 

I suspect most foreigners do. 

Mainlanders on the whole have an ambivalent view of foreigners, so it’s hardly surprising that foreigners might hold ambivalent views of them and their country.

You title a chapter, “This is China,” which is a common term to explain the unexplainable in China. It seems this concept is unique to China and maybe Vietnam 25 years ago, but can’t be applied to other countries with authoritarian governments like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Do you think this concept will still apply to China once it opens up, or is it more a cultural phenomenon and less a political one?
I open that chapter with a quote from Valentin Chu, a little known Chinese journalist who wrote, for my money, one of the best books about the CCP in the early ’60s [Ta Ta, Tan Tan: The Inside Story of Communist China]. 

He articulates a character profile of the Chinese in that book which I’m sure would resonate with many foreigners who have lived there for any length of time. 

For me, it’s the perfect encapsulation of the Chinese and China as I see it — which is as the world inside out, back to front and upside down. 

I can’t see China’s fundamental character changing, whether the polity stays the same or not. 

As far as cultures go, I think China has a better claim than most to immutability. 

Even Mao, who tried to reformat China’s hard drive with the Cultural Revolution, admitted to Nixon that he’d only managed to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.

How long did it take you to write your book and can you describe your publishing process?
It took four years: one year writing and three years procrastinating. 

I’m afraid I’m one of those people who will find any reason not to write. 

The downside is prolonged periods of inactivity. 

The upside is a very tidy home and a very well ordered music collection. 

I learned the hard way that the writer of a book is faced with one of two choices: be occupied writing it, or be preoccupied with not writing it. 

Eventually I reasoned that I may as well be occupied with it because at least then there was a chance the day would come when I would no longer be preoccupied with it.
As for publishing, I despaired for a short while and then came two offers and one “let’s keep talking” in the space of a month. 

I was fortunate to find the publisher I did. 

Anna Rosner Blay and Louis de Vries of Hybrid Publishers in Melbourne were a pleasure to work with. 

It’s very encouraging to find a publisher who likes your work enough to want to publish it. 

Anna is an author herself and understands the sort of thin-skinned creatures we writers are. 

Her editorial guidance was collaborative and she didn’t suggest I change terribly much which is really more editorial freedom a first-time author could possibly hope for.

Have you returned to China since you left? Do you plan to do any book events there?
I haven’t and since I finished the book my area of interest has shifted somewhat to Indonesia, that other great behemoth of my region, where I’ve had the chance to live for a couple of years. 

The comparison has been interesting. 

Both countries have national psyches traumatized by colonialism. 

But there are more distinguishing features than parallels. 

China is authoritarian; Indonesia is democratic. 

China has a predominant ethnicity — Han, over 90 percent — whereas in Indonesia the largest of its 300 or so ethnicities is Javanese at 40 percent. 

China is largely atheistic; Indonesia is deeply religious. 

I’m an outsider in both cultures — a laowai in China, a bule in Indonesia. 

It’s always reassuring, I think, to know one’s place.