Archive: Empress Dowager Cixi

28:25And those were the lessons that they also wanted to learn to benefit China. Can I bring Shishi back into the equation? Japan and China were at war. What did she do there? Actually, Shixi, she was always being blamed and heavily criticized because of the war, because saying that means she misdirected most of the funding, which was supposed to support the Navy, to build something else, that is to build a new palace. And so that's why people have been criticizing her action by saying that you were responsible for losing the war against the Japanese. But when we really want to focus on the Navy, because the naval battle is one of the major segments of the first Sino-Japanese war, I would say that we also have to be careful that the Shishi at the very beginning, going back to that self-strengthening movement, she was very supportive of building the Navy.

29:14She was very supportive of constructing a modern Navy. And not just the Navy, actually, but also supportive of other modernization projects. So it was only during the years leading up to the war that she felt like, OK, maybe I should step a little bit distant from the scene. And so that's why I really need to build a palace and to retire. I would say that Shishi was partially responsible for losing the war against Japan. But at the same time, we really have to understand that there is also some structural problems within the Qing Empire at that time, including corruptions, nepotism, inefficiencies.

29:50And these kind of problems mean we can't just simply blame these women as a leader of the state. Yes, I mean, she's responsible for not being able to mitigate these problems. But at the same time, we have to understand these structural problems has been there for a very, very long time. 1895 is a turning point in this story when it comes to Tsuxi, because really in the 30 years before that, she had been generally pretty supportive in the court of what you might call conservative reform. In other words, gradual reform on things like setting up a new college to teach foreign languages, for setting up arsenals that would create new modern armaments on Chinese soil.

30:29China's first equivalent of a foreign ministry, the Zhongli Yaman. And for a long time, actually, these seem pretty successful. So really, a lot of people expected that when this war did break out between the Japanese and the Chinese in 1894, that actually the Navy that Ron's been talking about might have a decent chance of success. When in fact, the Navy was just, you know, knocked out of port and essentially the Chinese lost completely and had to sign a humiliating treaty at the Japanese port of Shiwanoseki, which essentially brought an end to the war in a fashion that meant that China had lost completely, there was then a real moment of revelation and people at court who wanted China to become strong looked to Tzu Xi and blamed her for what had happened, but they were less inclined to actually show that there hadn't been sufficient radical reform at court, which is not her fault individually, to actually modernise China fast enough.

31:21Young-win? You know, most historians have not been kind to her. And I think it's because she's such a skilled politician. She loves power and all that. But I think we should also give her credit for because if she didn't bless all the reform projects, the Navy, whatever, I don't know where we would be today. Like Ron was saying, we can't just blame her for everything. Were there attempts to overthrow her? Yes, there were. Because after the war, Shishi realised that, oh, it's really time to really make some real changes now because we got defeated by the Japanese with our little brothers. I mean, how would it happen?

31:59Rana? One of the things that I think is important to remember at this period is that a lot of power had drained away from the Qing court during the last two or three decades of the 19th century. What was that? Because of the Taiping Rebellion, where essentially it had only been put down because the Qing court in desperation allowed local provincial leaders, people like Zeng Gofan and Li Hongzhang, to actually launch provincial armies of their own, bearing in mind that a Chinese province can be and is the size of European countries, so it's still substantial. But it meant that from a centralised system, there was much more of a move to the kind of local provincial areas in terms of military power.

32:39And once that had begun, the process that by the 20th century would become known as warlordism, in other words, local military leaders kind of fighting each other for power, had begun to be set in train. In particular, there was one northern-based area known as the Beiyang, which would have a succession of leaders who actually would become a sort of power in their own right and would push back against what the court in Beijing actually wanted to do. Sometimes they'd act in concert with them, and other times they would actually oppose them. And that means that when we consider what Tzu Xi was doing and the court was doing, we should always remember that in some senses it's a tribute to her that there was as much centralised power in the court as there was.

33:19because a great deal of the military power and political power and even taxing power had moved down to the Chinese provinces during the period that she was actually behind the throne. How did she react to that? She is very interesting because she knew that she needed to control these men as well. So she kept something, you know, she can control them. She would knight them, you know, give them titles, make them do things for her. But then at the same time, she would pit them against each other as well for competition, for projects, for money. So she's really very skilled at managing people that make all these Han Chinese men were kind of loyal to her.

33:58For managing people in her own interests. But the interests of the empire as she saw it, I mean, to be fair to her, all of her actions, everything from assassinations to subversions, were done with the belief that the Qing dynasty must survive and that at a time of crisis, she was the one to actually continue to keep it stable. Three years later, in 1898, you get a desperate surge of more radical reform being proposed. The hundred days of reform that are put forward by certain reformers, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, at first with the agreement, with the acquiescence of the Dowager Empress Tzu Xi, but then she turned against them very strongly and actually shut down these reforms.

34:39The hundred days reform seems rather dramatic, and it was rather dramatic. Did it work? is not that effective, I mean, in hindsight. But it does serve as a wake-up call, I mean, for some of the intellectuals in China by saying that, well, I mean, the Qing Empire was really not into substantial reforms. So they were actually trying to advocate another path, I mean, to, for example, overthrow the Qing Empire and these kind of things. Actually, the failure of the Hundred Day Reforms was also planting the seed of those revolutionaries in China to overthrow the Qing Empire later in 1912. Did she see herself as a traditionalist or a reformer?

35:19For me, maybe it's a little bit different from Rana. For me, it's her power. 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. So in a way, she's very complex. She's not just a reformer. She supported reform, but to a degree, to a degree that doesn't threaten the survival of the dynasty. And she would become conservative when necessary. But she managed it very well. Yes, I would say so, Rana. Well, in 1898, during the Hundred Days Reform, which basically takes place over the summer and early autumn, you see both specific and general reforms that are being put forward, which she's associated with, which actually do seem quite progressive.

36:04So perhaps the real keynote one is the foundation in 1898 of the institution that still exists today in the form of Peking University, essentially China's first modern university. And she was actually very supportive of that. What did they mean by modern? Well, teaching modern subjects such as languages, sciences that had been brought in through Western channels and so forth, rather than the old Confucian style of teaching, which was essentially the old classics that had been there for 2 ,000 years or so. A few years later, they would actually abolish the old traditional exam system. But the university itself in its first form was founded in 1898.

36:40At the same time, she was also keen to make sure that while reforms were encouraged, that they didn't overthrow the entire system. So, for instance, constitutional monarchy would be a good way of thinking about what some of these figures, Kang Ya Wei, who's been mentioned, and also Yang Chi Chao, probably one of the other major modernist thinkers of this time. of this time. If you think about figures like Benjamin Franklin, or in a slightly different way, perhaps someone like William Morris, in other words, people who bring together literary and artistic skills with a certain sort of political sensibility, that's what these men were like.

37:13And they were brought in essentially as a sort of think tank to try and find new and radical ways to change society. They put forward ideas like constitutional monarchy, like the idea of adapting traditional Confucian thought, so that it would throw off its old hierarchical sorts of mechanisms and instead become more egalitarian. And for a while she seemed actually quite keen on this, as indeed the emperor, the Guangxu emperor. But when it looked like they were moving in a direction of reform that was perhaps closer to revolution, something that she found uncomfortable, that's when the screws turned and essentially she shut down the reforms and essentially sent out to have these reformers arrested or exiled.

37:52Yang Wen, you want to follow that? It reminds me there's a similarity between the late Qing and communist regime today, because the Qing also undertook reform and it enabled them to live decades, few decades longer. And so is the regime today, right? But then the Qing refused political reform. That's why in the end it collapsed. For me, as a historian, I'd like to see kind of the patterns. Brana. In 1900, a couple of years later, you have the Boxer Rebellion, a peasant uprising which Cixi decides actually to throw in the weight of the Chinese Empire on the side of the rebels against the Westerners, leading to a terribly destructive incursion by the Western powers that essentially leads to, again, a sort of defeat for China.

38:43Ron, can you tell listeners about the Boxer Rebellion and how she dealt with this? So, yeah, in the 1900s, there was lots of religious incidents. I mean, that's the tension between the Westerners, Western merchants, Western missionaries in China, and the Han Chinese in China have been brewing. And there was some burning of the churches, I mean, killing of some of these Westerners in China. And a wave of anti-foreigner sentiments happening in China during that period of time. At the very beginning, actually, Shixi didn't really trust these boxers. the boxers was the term used by westerners for these peasant rebels who essentially came from a very devastated part of north china where there'd been drought and poverty and they became known as boxers because they basically went through the villages in the countryside wearing sort of almost magic costumes saying that special ceremonies which involved clenching their fists could be used to try and push back against this poverty and desperation so they they used essentially ideas of magic and superstition to inspire the peasants to hit back against the two groups that they thought were their enemies.

39:49One were Westerners and the others were Chinese Christians. Yeah, indeed. Back to Shixi, her role with the boxers were also quite complex. Because as I said, I mean, at the very beginning, she didn't really trust these people. But when the tensions between the Qing court and those foreign powers began to grow, and then Shixi really wanted to make use of these boxers to buy her time, at least to inflict some kind of damage to the foreign communities or the foreign powers in China. So she began very supportive of these boxers against the foreigners. And after that, of course, I mean, we know that after the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing court was forced to sign another unequal treaties.

40:28One really important moment concerning Tuxi during the Boxer Rebellion is that moment when she actually says that she's going to declare war against the Westerners. Lots of people at court actually advise her against this. If we're looking for decisions that Tsushi makes personally that go one way or the other, you can blame her for or praise her for. That's a really important one because lots of others, there are even a couple of people who are executed for telling her that she shouldn't do this. And by declaring war against essentially the Allied powers, the British, the French, the Japanese, the Americans and so forth, she brought in what was in the end, I think, a 20 ,000 troop army of foreigners to come in and put down the rebellion, which then became not just an attack on the boxers, but actually a fight back against China itself.

41:12And for that particular decision in its aftermath, she can, I think, legitimately be blamed. That's, yeah, that was her own. And she fled Beijing in the capital when the boxers arrived. The night before, she disguised herself as a countrywoman and she fled, of course, taking the emperor, you know, the puppet emperor. with her. So, yeah, it was a disaster she was personally responsible for. Yes. And as Ron was saying, the aftermath of the boxers, including the indemnity that was paid at that time, was devastating for China. Indeed, it was devastating. And Su Xi, I mean, was also like, at that time after the war, and then she blamed the boxers by saying that, I mean, you were the one who incites me in all these, like, turbulence and troubles.

41:53I mean, it wasn't my fault. I mean, it was your guys. I mean, you guys are doing things wrongly. So, yeah. So going back to Yang I mean, she was very skilled politician and she was always quite selfish in a sense. I mean, to really just want to side with something that she could benefit from. But you made a mistake there. I think we have to answer that by looking at what she did at the very end of her life, Melvin. And I think that, first of all, the aftermath of the boxers was most immediately that $333 million US dollars was asked by the Western powers in compensation from China. That was a crippling amount for China's treasury to have to pay.

42:29And it was one of the things that helped bring down the dynasty. But what happened immediately afterwards in 1902, which would then cover the last six years of her life until she died in 1908, was actually that she did support many of the reforms that she turned down just four years earlier in 1898. The experience of the box of war had essentially seemingly scarred her. And those ideas we mentioned, such as constitutional monarchy, trying to actually have elected local assemblies, abolishing the traditional examination system, which was finally killed off after a thousand years in 1905, setting up new educational establishments with modern education.

43:03All of this was finally implemented. So you could say that at the very end of her life, she did actually support the modernisation, which she seemed to have been very ambivalent about before. The problem was that, as it turned out, it was very late in the day, and just a few years, three years, in fact, after her own death in 1908, the system collapsed in the Southern Revolution in 1911. 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. Yang Wen, how would you assess her now? I would say she was a leader at a time of crisis.

43:37She was a strong leader because without her, I don't know whether the Qing would have survived after 1861, the 60-year-old boy emperor. I don't know. So we have to give credit to her for her coming. Maybe she answered her call in times of crisis, but of course she was there for herself as well, for the dynasty and for herself as well. So she's a complex character and she needs more study and research and we need to be a bit more fairer to her. Historians are always blaming her. Ron, what would you say her legacy was? I agree that we shouldn't really just blame her because as a political leader to lead such a declining country or empire, and I think she already did what she could.

44:26But at the same time, I would insist that she's really a kind of politician that is really in love with power. I mean, she really always wants to obtain powers for herself, whatever possible. Going back, for example, like Rana was mentioning the new reforms, I mean, that was after the boxes. And then so on paper, I would say, yes, I mean, it seems like the structure, I mean, the new units, I mean, like the postal office, I mean, the education office and so forth, the banking office and finance office established on paper. It seems like it's a substantial reforms. But the substance within these reforms was problematic because she was still like trying to be picky.

45:03And she tried to really pick those who were in favor of her policy or her vision to get into this kind of reforms. So it is still a problematic reforms in a way. Finally, Rana, what would your view be of her legacy? I think the two things that set her on the wrong path were putting down those reforms in 1898, the 100 days, far too quickly and far too decisively, and then supporting the boxers in 1900 against the foreign powers. if she hadn't done either of those things it might just have been possible to turn china into a federalized constitutional monarchy which is where it was entering ending up to some extent by the time of her death and that may be a legacy in the sense that in today's china you can think about those issues of whether slow steady constitutional reform ahead of a crisis might be a better thing to imagine than letting the crisis come and then having to do it at high speed and possibly failing Well thank you all very much thanks to Ronald Poe, Yang Wen Zheng and Rana Mitter and to our studio engineer Bob Nittles next week we go back to the 14th century and a political theorist seen as a founder of modern democracy and an inspiration for the Reformation that's Marsilius of Padua thanks for listening And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests So what would you like to say that you didn't have a chance to say?

46:29I'd like to just say that the reformers who we've mentioned particularly as the ones who were first given 100 days to try and propose reformers and then essentially purged from court and either executed or sent to exile, they're fascinating thinkers in their own right. Kang Youwei, Yang Qichao, they're a real sort of generation of people who thought in ways that Chinese thinkers simply hadn't done before. Quick example, Kang Youwei is one of the most original thinkers, not just really in Chinese history, but anywhere. He believed in really radical reform. He believed that marriage should be an annual contract that was renewed by the consent of both parties.

47:04That would sound modern even today. At one point, he tried to launch a colony in Mexico. He launched, he got very into hot air balloons and was sort of flying those around for a while. That turned out not to be a profitable enterprise. But this was a man who not only thought outside the box, there wasn't really a box in which he thought. And his big intellectual contribution, a thing for which he's still read today by people who look into Chinese intellectual thought, is the modernization of Confucian thinking. He believed in something called the Datong, the Great Unity, which was the idea that somehow you could bring together traditional Chinese thinking with modernization.

47:39So he loved Confucius. He wrote a great essay, still read, called Confucius as a Reformer. But in it, he said that the hierarchy, you know, the lack of equality in traditional Confucianism, that wouldn't do anymore in a modern world. And instead, Confucius had to be someone who could be seen as someone who could push forward equality as well. And you could see the sort of, you know, like socialists who came before Marx, in a sense, in the European context, the people in the 20th century who pushed equality, Mao became the most famous Mao Zedong, in some senses draw from that push in the direction that Kang Yo-wei and others put forward.

48:13So I do think that understanding these people as really interesting thinkers in their own right is something that deserves attention too. Ron, what about you? Well, OK, I would like to talk about the century of humiliations because, well, so first of all, this is a conception coined by the PRC government. I mean, later to sort of to blame the Qing empire in the 19th century by losing all these humiliating battles against the foreigners or foreign powers. And so that's why the late Qing, in which Min Suxi played a big role in ruling this empire at that time, was being blamed, criticized heavily because of losing those walls.

48:49And also I feel like China, during the late 19th century, didn't really have too much progress and didn't really have too much development because of this century of humiliations discourse. But what I would like to add is that, I mean, going back to what we have just talked about earlier, well there were lots of various kinds of reformations modernizing campaigns and so forth I mean that is worth mentioning and Zixi played a crucial role in supporting most of these reforms so the 19th century wasn't simply a century of humiliations I would say it was also full of opportunities and new chances for the empire for the intellectuals, for the officials really to thrive And you?

49:31I think I'm going back to what I said earlier. I'm always thinking about what we could learn from history. So you see the late Qing launch reform. They built four navies. They bought warships from Germany, from Britain and trained everybody. So they acquired all the hardware needed, but they didn't save the dynasty. So coming to today, it seems China is the same, acquiring a lot of hardware, you know, infrastructure, high speed trade, you know, battleships and navies and what have you. Would they save the communist regime? I don't know. So for me, that's a very interesting parallel that Li Qing launch reform didn't save.

50:15It seems the more reform they did, the more disastrous. And today, the same post-Mao reform, Deng Xiaoping, you know, China's very powerful. What did it say of the communist regime? I don't know. That's something I would like to think more about. Well, I just want to add something about the Navy, because that's my comfort zone. And actually, the late Qing Navy, I mean, what we haven't really emphasized, it was one of the greatest Navy in East Asia. Like 10 years before the first Sino-Jepans war, it was being reported by Western columnists or reporters saying that China, the Qing, actually are one of the greatest navy, not just in Asia, but in the world.

50:51So it's not just the hardware that really impresses the foreigners and also the others. But also training up the very capable navies, learning from the West, is quite impressive to me. But we have to understand that by maintaining a navy, it's a costly end of us. So it's not easy for the Qing court to really keep pouring in money, to build up a navy. So that is the reason why eventually they lost. But it doesn't mean that they didn't really have a golden era in their naval history. And I'd just add that Yang Wen mentioned high-speed trains. Famously, there was a railway, one of China's first railways, built under Cixi, but she refused to allow a steam engine to actually pull it and insisted it should be, I think, pulled by a bullock, I think, in that case.

51:36Unix. Sorry? Unix. Was it Unix? Yeah. Oh, right, okay, eunuchs, gosh, by humans in that case, yes, even more so, because essentially there would be a sort of ritual impurity, essentially, if she allowed a steam engine to pull it. That hasn't been so much of a problem with today's China's high-speed trains, I think. No, no, no, yeah. How much do they reach back to her, the Chinese politicians at the moment, look back to those days, are they glorious days? Oh, my goodness. This is one of the most politically sensitive periods in contemporary China. It's very hard to talk about. The reason being, actually, the bit that we mentioned briefly at the end of the programme, but actually for many people is one of the most interesting areas, which is the very last phase of reforms under Tsushi, the so-called new reforms from 1902 until the empire suddenly collapsed with the revolution of 1911.

52:22The reason being that essentially those reforms were trying to turn China into a country that was a sort of constitutional monarchy with locally elected assemblies that would work from the bottom up. You know, people would learn about elections and democracy at the local level and then eventually you would get national level elections. Now, you can see why today's Communist Party might consider this is a lesson they do not want people to learn. and actually doing research on what seems a very long time ago, more than 100 years ago, is actually still a deeply sensitive subject in China today, precisely for that reason.

52:54Yes. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Would you like a tea or coffee, anybody? I like a cup of tea, I suppose. A cup of tea, if that's what's possible. Thank you. Yes, a cup of tea. Yes, please. Of course. I'm OK. Thank you very much. Three teas. Thank you. Great. So, Alice Loxton, I'm here for the history. Well, Ben Henderson, I like the formality. And that's perfect because we have a lot of history to share. Why did tea become such a British obsession? How did English turn into the language we speak today? And yes, why do women's clothes still not have pockets? Well, in our new podcast, Here for the History, we're investigating how stories from the past shape everyday life today.

53:38Basically the things we've all noticed but never stopped to question. Listen on BBC Sounds or watch on YouTube. Just search for Here for the History.

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