Quote:
Originally Posted by bfisher
Cixi never ruled in her own right, but as a regent for the titular Emperor. Therefore, lacking legitimacy, her power was limited to decreeing what was acceptable to most of the grandees. As long as she was proposing things that would maintain or strengthen the existing power structure, the grandees as a group would have been prepared to go along with her. When she sent her eunuch favorite An Dehai on the silk procurement trip, it was unnecessary, as there was an existing system for doing that; she wasn't trying to resolve a crisis. Worse, she sent a eunuch out as the head of an official mission, which scandalized the grandees, even those who usually supported Cixi.
Executing An Dehai offended nobody but Cixi, and would have pleased almost everyone else in China.
At the same time, since her son has 13, and would normally be expected to assume power at 14. Cixi would have been seen as a lame-duck regent, so anyone who contemplated do something that might offend Cixi may not have worried about retribution from Cixi.
|
I suppose then that what was misleading in the book was that it was presented at times before and after this section as if Cixi had much more power than all that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
This sounds like good careful reading.
This whole time the Qing Dynasty was dying. Chang certainly mentions this, as in statements about how the court would never be the same after the Boxer rebellion.
How much to focus on the life, and how much on the times, has to be a dilemma for any biographer. It seems to me Chang heavily puts the focus on the life of Cixi. But it's not like there is some standard reliable account of who was really in charge at every moment, and it is being hidden from us.
If you haven't finished you might not want to read this yet, but here is the one most simultaneously scholarly and negative review I found:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...76477589,d.cWc
I think reviewer Pamela Crossley is right that Chang pushes her Cixi-the-powerful thesis quite hard. But, as far as I can tell, Crossley's alternative story -- essentially, that Cixi was controlled by the Beiyand Army -- is far from proven. And I didn't like the sneering tone of Crossley's review. |
Thanks for the review; I'm going to read it. I think you're quite right that perhaps there is no way to know exactly how much power Cixi had vs the grandees, but I would've appreciated it if that were made clear in the book. Instead, I feel that Chang presented her thesis as factual while flitting back and forth between presenting Cixi as powerful and weak with no overarching transitional explanations between these disparities.