![]() ![]() ![]() She has tackled Cixi, one of the significant figures of premodern China, and offers a largely new-and to me, mostly convincing-interpretation. Now comes Jung Chang, author of the universally acclaimed Wild Swans (1992), a biography of three generations of her family, and, with her husband Jon Halliday, the more critically received Mao: The Unknown Story (2005). But many social scientists still insist that Cixi was a force for the bad. Since then the judgment on Cixi has somewhat altered, so that in general histories, by Jonathan Spence for instance, she is a more rounded figure. ![]() A Chinese friend, in high school in Beijing in the 1970s, tells me she was taught that Cixi was a maiguozei, a traitor. Those reformers, we learned, were unlike the ruling Manchus, who had conquered China in 1644 and were struggling brutally to preserve their crumbling empire. In the textbooks of that time, leading American scholars characterized Cixi as cruel, imperious, and opposed to the Westernizing reforms championed by progressive officials, all of whom were Han Chinese. In the mid-1950s, when I was a graduate student of Chinese history, the Manchu Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) was invariably condemned as a reactionary hate figure Mao Zedong was admired. ![]() The Dowager Empress Cixi with four eunuchs and Der Ling, a lady-in-waiting, circa 1903–1905 ![]()
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