The Empress Who Launched Modern China

Jung Chang became an overnight sensation in the 1990s with the publication of Wild Swans, the story of her family and their account of life  during China’s Cultural Revolution. She followed this up with a biography of Mao Tse Tung. Now she has tackled the life of Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), the most important woman in Chinese history who ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age. Jung Chang covers Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, and the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs – one of whom she fell in love with, resulting in tragic consequences. On Tuesday 4 March 2014, Jung Chang addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss her fascinating life as a writer, and her latest book Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China.

EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI: THE CONCUBINE WHO LAUNCHED MODERN CHINA

JUNG CHANG

Thank you. I’m delighted – indeed I’m thrilled – to be here again to talk about my third book, and thank you very much more inviting me again. I think I’ll spend a few minutes talking about how I became a writer, and then I’ll turn to Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China.

I was born and grew up in China under Mao. When I was a child, I wanted to be a writer but it was something that I didn’t even spell out to myself. In those days, to be a writer was to be engaged in a most dangerous occupation. Nearly all writers were condemned one way or another, driven to suicide, sent to the gulag, some even executed. Even writing for oneself was dangerous.

I remember writing my first poem, on my sixteenth birthday, in 1968, in the Cultural Revolution. I was lying in bed, polishing my poem when I heard the door banging and Red Guards had come to raid our flat. My poem would have brought me and my family trouble so I had to quickly rush to the toilet to tear up the poem and flush it down. And that was the end of my first literary endeavour. 

In the following years, I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas and worked as a peasant, as a barefoot doctor, and later as a steel worker and an electrician. When I was spreading manure in the paddy fields and checking electricity supplies on top of electricity poles, I realised that I was always writing in my head with an invisible pen. I just couldn’t put pen to paper.

In 1976, Mao died and China began to change. In 1978, for the first time, scholarships for going abroad were awarded on an academic basis. I sat for a national exam, and did reasonably well, so I became part the first group of fourteen people to go and study in Britain. As far as I know, I was the first person to get out of Szechuan Province – a province then of 19 million people – to go and study in the West. I was so lucky that, when I got my Doctorate in linguistics from the University of York in England, I became the first person from Communist China ever to get a Doctorate from a British University.

When I arrived in Britain, I could write now whatever I wanted to write. But it was at that moment that I lost the desire to write. I had come to a completely new and different world; it was like landing on Mars.Everything was so different. I just wanted to spend every minute soaking up the atmosphere. In those days, the fourteen of us were not allowed to go out on our own – we had to move in our group. We were all wearing this Mao suit – some of you might have a mental image of a blue uniform-like thing, baggy trousers and so on. And we were quite a sight in the London streets.

We were told not to do many things, one of which was not to visit an English pub because the Chinese translation for pub suggested somewhere indecent with nude women gyrating. Of course, I was torn with curiosity. I spotted a pub across the road from the college and one day I sneaked out of the college and darted across the road and pushed the door of the pub open. Of course I saw only some men sitting there drinking beer. I was rather disappointed.

Soon, I was breaking all the rules and trying to sneak out and to lead a life of my own. I had come from China with a cautionary tale that anyone who made a foreign boyfriend or girlfriend would be carted off back to China in a sack and drugged. And we all firmly believed in this cautionary tale. And so, if I was miles away from the Chinese embassy, in a car, I would just slide down the seat so my head would disappear from the window so nobody could see me. I wouldn’t be carted off back to China drugged in a sack. Of course, I don’t think the Chinese embassy was engaged in that sort of surveillance because China was changing. But I was born and raised in Mao’s China and the fear had been deeply embedded in my heart.

Life in London was exciting – terrifically exciting. There were the language misunderstandings, of course. Before I left China, the only foreigners I had spoken to were sailors in a port in South China where, as English language students, we went to practise our English. In those days, China was completely closed to foreigners. Sichuan, the province I came from, had many military industries so it was especially closed. Talking to the foreign sailors was our only chance. We were so keen to talk to them, we would sit in the only restaurant eagerly grabbing the sailors. Of course, we had no idea what must be on their minds.

 Life was exciting. I didn’t want to think about the past. To write, would be to look inward and backward, to a past I wanted to forget about. I had just been through the Cultural Revolution. My grandfather who raised us, died in the Cultural Revolution. My father died in the Cultural Revolution. I wanted to forget about it. When people asked me where I came from I always said South Korea because I didn’t want to begin to think about China, to explain about China.

Ten years went by and my mother came to London to stay with me in 1988. It was her first trip abroad. For the first time, she told me the stories of her life and the stories of my grandmother and her relationship with my father. Once she started, she couldn’t stop. She stayed with me for six months and she talked every day. When I was out working, she talked into a tape recorder so by the time she left London she had left me 60 hours of tape recordings.

When I was listening to my mother I kept saying to myself, I’ve got to write all of this down. I realised that my mother knew I had an unspoken dream of being a writer and she was helping me become one by recording her stories. And that’s how I came to write Wild Swans which changed my life.

In the early 1990s, after Wild Swans was published, I began to think about my next book. And Mao seemed to be the obvious subject because he dominated my life, he was the most important man in modern China and yet I felt the world knew astonishingly little about him. And I had many unanswered questions. I thought writing about him would be the best way to get to know Mao a bit.

My husband, Jon Halliday, was also interested in Mao. We embarked upon the project together, dividing our research by language. I dealt with the Chinese language sources. Jon speaks many languages so he was landed with the rest of the work. He spent years working in the Russian archives, which turned out to be a treasure trove. In the 1990s, the Russian archives were opened. In China, many of Mao’s contemporaries were still alive and we were able to interview over 100 of them. People were dying to talk. It was a most exciting time.

Then I decided to write about the Empress Dowager. Now, people often say that Mao started modern China, and that he may have done many awful things but he turned China into a modern society. This is not so. The person who turned China – a medieval China – into a modern society was Empress Dowager Cixi.

Cixi was born in 1835 in Beijing of those days of camels and so on. When she was 16 years old, she went through one of the periodic nationwide selections for imperial consorts. Like hundreds of girls from all over China, she was paraded in front of the emperor and became one of his concubines, a low ranking concubine. He became her husband. 

In 1860, the British and the French invaded Beijing to expand their trade. The emperor had shut China from foreigners. So the French and British entered Beijing and burned the old summer palace. Cixi’s husband then fled with the court to beyond the Great Wall. He was so heartbroken by the burning of the Summer Palace, he refused to return to Beijing and died in self imposed exile in the northern wilderness beyond the Great Wall.

The emperor’s only son was Cixi’s son. In all court paintings he was always twice the size of his elder sister. When the emperor died he left eight regents, or princes, to supervise the young boy. But, at this point, Cixi launched a coup against these eight powerful men. Cixi was a low rank concubine and the Empress held the highest rank. Far from back biting and being rivals, these two women became friends and comrades. They launched the coup together, an act that carried a prescribed punishment of death by a thousand cuts.

But their takeover was very popular because Cixi wanted to open the door and do business with the West. This was to benefit China itself. It changed China. After their coup, in 1861 when the two women, particularly Empress Dowager Cixi, began to run the country the door to China was opened.

Even as they controlled China, these women were not allowed to come face to face with their officials who were all male. They sat behind a silk screen with the throne in front. Cixi’s son, a five year old, would be put on the throne to greet the officials who would prostrate themselves before the young emperor. This way, they launched many reforms.

British consular official Robert Hart, an Ulster man, made a great contribution to the Chinese economy. Cixi employed him to run Chinese customs – Chinese customs contributed to one third of China’s national income. Hart ran this major financial institution for as long as Cixi was alive, until 1908. And then he left China.

The man standing in the middle was Anson Burlingame who was President Abraham Lincoln’s first ambassador to China. Like other foreign envoys, when Empress Dowager Cixi opened the doors of China in 1861, Anson Burlingame came to Beijing. When his term ended, Cixi made an inspired move and appointed him as China’s ambassador to the West. At that time, no Chinese officials spoke any foreign languages. None had been abroad and they had no ideas about global diplomacy. Burlingame represented China around Europe and America. Even Queen Victoria had a diary entry about Burlingame. This was an extraordinary thing for a Chinese ambassador to be an American, although Burlingame’s two deputies were Chinese.

Cixi also sent Chinese children abroad. She sent envoys around the world. The children who were sent to America received a comprehensive education – this was from 1870s. After they returned to China, they became pillars of China’s modernisation. Electricity, the railway, steamers, the modern army and navy, the modern way of doing diplomacy, mining and industrialisation were all brought into China by Cixi.

The Empress Dowager also launched other reforms. Cixi who banned foot binding – the  practice that tortured Chinese women for over 1000 years. My grandmother had her feet bound. She was my size and yet her feet were just a few inches long. With foot binding, only the big toe was allowed to grow. The other four toes and the arch were crushed under a big stone with the binding used to stop the broken bones from recovering. Cixi herself escaped foot binding because she was a Manchu when the Manchus ruled China. But they were only one per cent of the population. Cixi hated foot binding. In the new century, the twentieth century, her first decree was to ban foot binding.

Cixi introduced a host of revolutionary education. The Chinese education system was based on subjecting a child – a boy – from the age of four, to imbibe in Confucian classics which children couldn’t possibly understand. Cixi’s son was subjected to that rule and he hated this educational practice. When he succeeded the throne, at sixteen, Cixi’s son became the emperor. Cixi should have retired to the harem. But the sixteen year old had no interest in reforms or running the empire. All he was interested in was fun and sex as with other sixteen year olds.

He would leave the Forbidden City secretly to frequent male as well as female prostitutes. And he died before he was nineteen. When Cixi saw that her son was unable to assume the authority he needed, she put a three year old on the throne, her nephew, and continued to rule from behind the silk screens. This adopted son, Emperor Guangxhu, grew up reciting Confucian classics and had no interest in going outside the Forbidden City. He also had poor health and was terrified of thunders. If there was a thunder storm. all the eunuchs would gather and shout at the top of their voices to try to drown out the thunders.

Cixi was not a good mother to her adopted son. They became estranged. Guangxhu rejected Cixi her once he was old enough to take over., relying on his classics tutor, Grand Tutor Wung, to give him advice. Japan seized its chance at this point, going to war with China in 1895. In this war, China with such a young emperor who rarely stepped out of the Forbidden City and whose chief war advisor was a classics tutor, was no match for Japan run by a first rate statesman. China suffered a spectacular defeat.

With its defeat, the Western powers saw China as a paper tiger and came in for what they could grab of China. Starting with the Germans in 1897 who the areas around the Qingdao. The British took another bit and the French and the Russians. That gave rise to the xenophobic Boxers, starting in the Shandong province and expanding into neighbouring Beijing. Missionaries and Chinese Christians bore the brunt of their brutality and atrocities. Foreign powers then invaded China – an allied army of eight countries put down the Boxers.

Cixi had also tried to overcome the Boxers but she was unwise to think she could use them to fight the foreigners. She thought their hatred for foreigners would make them brave soldiers. But, of course, they couldn’t fight modern weapons. Most were wiped out; some turned into bandits and devastated northern China. Cixi was driven out of the Forbidden City as the allied army entered it. During her exile, Cixi reflected and repented as to what she had done. She then issued decrees to reproach myself and made peace with the Western powers. She returned to Beijing at the beginning of the twentieth century. As she entered the city a photographer caught her waving as she passed wall, a gesture she had learned from the envoys she had sent abroad. This was a very modern moment because Chinese monarchs were not allowed to be seen. Emperors, when they went out, were hidden from the people’s view behind large screens. So this was her first wave.

Cixi had many other firsts – starting from her banning foot binding. She released women from their homes and encouraged them to receive education like men, and to go abroad. So much so, that a Chinese book in 1903 declared that the twentieth century would be the century of women’s rights. Cixi also introduced Western legal systems and banned death by a thousand cuts and other gruesome forms of punishment and death. She had her photograph taken. When her photographs were taken, the photographer saw that she looked like a lady approaching her 70s and the real pictures would have made her frown. So he airbrushed the prints before he presented them to Cixi and she was thrilled.

Cixi loved to make her face up although, as a widow, she was not allowed to. She applied make-up discretely. She was intensely vain. The airbrushed picture was her present to the US president in 1905. The American press  said she looked 40 not 70. Then Cixi had the pictures blown to giant sizes and hung them all over the Forbidden City. And she posed like a coquettish little girl. One thing she didn’t reform was people having to kneel in front of her and only with her permission could they stand up. Cixi was a woman of intense curiosity. She tried tricycles and she wanted to ride into a hot air balloon. But she did not drive in a car although given an imperial car as a gift. There was an insurmountable problem since the driver could not drive whilst kneeling. A driver needed had to sit in front of the Empress Dowager. So she would drew the line there and never rode in a car.

To Cixi, kneeling was the reinforcement of the authority and sacredness of the throne. Without that constant reinforcement, the throne might be in trouble. But symbols can never work magic. Cixi’s last project was to attempt to turn China into a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. She set out a detailed program for a period of nine years, from 1908. This showed changes to be made with each year after which there would be an election. But Cixi died in 1908 and nothing came of it.

Cixi’s personal life was a tragedy. In her late 20s and early 30s she was in love with a eunuch which caused a tremendous uproar. When discovered, the eunuch was beheaded, along with many other eunuchs. His corpse was exposed for three days so the public could see he had no male organ. Cixi suffered a nervous breakdown for months even though she was no shrinking violet. In the coup, by which she took power, she had faced death by a thousand cuts and she didn’t so much as bat an eyelid. But she really was in love with this eunuch and from then on her heart was closed because the price was too high.

The day before she died, when she knew she was dying, she poisoned the emperor – her adopted son. From her point of view, if she died and he lived China would end up in the hands of Japan. The Japanese were intent on building a giant East Asian empire to dominate China. The Emperor would go along with them. So she killed her adopted son. And, in the last three hours of her life, she came to the view that a constitutional monarchy might not work – indeed it would not work without somebody as strong as she to make it work. The vast majority – the Han Chinese – were never going to owe their allegiance to a weak Manchu throne.

Three years later, when the republican uprising broke out and blood began to be shed, the Manchu dynasty surrendered. And China’s transition from absolute monarchy to republic was astonishingly peaceful and bloodless. That was her last legacy.