Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
. . . I thought that Jung Chang was perhaps prepared to cut Cixi a bit more slack than I would over things such as poisoning the Emperor so he didn't outlive her, having his favourite concubine thrown down a well to get rid of her, having someone executed by bastinado, and so on.
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The thesis of this good book is that Cixi was a strong reformist dictator.
Once you accept that she did have lots of real power -- and, as far as I can tell, it's a plausible interpretation -- the problem is how you balance the dictator part against the reformer part. This is a problem not just with writing a biography of Cixi, but also for anyone writing about Mao successor Deng Xiaoping, or Chiang Ching-kuo (son and successor of bad dictator Chiang kai-Shek), or Singapore strongman Lee Kuan Yew.
In a way, by pushing the Cixi-was-powerful thesis to the max, Chang leads us to cut Cixi less slack.
If we want to give her some measure of forgiveness, the fact that she effectively grew up in the middle ages, with its famed violent tenor of life, is a reason.