Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  Cixi had issued the decree without a second thought, just as she had ordered other bastinados to punish eunuchs over the years. Now she recognised that this cruel punishment was unacceptable in modern times, and she learned a lesson. Legal reforms soon banned the bastinado, and she publicly declared that she loathed (tong-hen) torture, including beating with wooden bats. In the following year, June 1904, she amnestied all those who had been involved in Wild Fox Kang’s 1898 plot and 1900 armed revolt. Those in prison were released, and the exiles could now return home. Political offenders were officially reduced to three people, all of them in exile: Wild Fox Kang, Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen. There were discussions about pardoning Liang.

  She tightened her security, and the places frequented by eunuchs were closely watched. In November 1904, Wild Fox Kang sent over a high-level assassination group from Japan, one key member of which, Luo, was a bomb operator. (He also practised hypnotism, which he seemed to think might be of some use.) Their plan was to plant bombs in places frequented by Cixi, ideally in the little steamer in which she travelled between the city and the Summer Palace. As the pilot of the steamer was the only person on board who was employed from outside the palace, they tried to secure that post for the bomb operator. But while he was perfecting the bombs, which involved travelling between China and Japan, Luo was captured on the coast in July 1905 and was swiftly executed on the spot. The incident was successfully hushed up. Cixi had learned to have her assassins eliminated in secret, and this was easier to achieve in the provinces, where there was less press scrutiny than in the capital. The Wild Fox helped her cover it up, as he did not want it known that he was masterminding assassinations.

  The death of Luo the bomb operator was a major setback for the Wild Fox. But the rest of the group continued to work under his old friend and bodyguard, Tiejun. In summer 1906, Tiejun and a fellow conspirator were arrested. He admitted straight away that he was in Beijing on the order of Kang to assassinate Cixi. The two men were not delivered to the Ministry of Punishments, as they should have been, according to legal procedure. In that case information about them would be open to the public – and to the press. So instead they were taken to General Yuan’s garrison in Tianjin, where they could be court-martialled away from the public eye. Cixi feared that, in an open trial, the men would simply defend themselves by pronouncing that they were only doing what the emperor wanted them to do.

  In Tianjin the two captives were escorted to separate barracks, not in shackles and not tortured, according to eye-witnesses. The barracks were under orders to treat them like VIPs, decorating their rooms with silk brocade and supplying them with lavish meals. Tiejun, a fine-looking man in his forties, wore European-style clothes: a white suit and a matching white hat. As he sweltered in the summer heat, the garrison arranged for tailors to work overnight to make him a change of clothes. The officer in charge asked him what sort of material he would like for his outer garments. He specified a kind of expensive silk, of which one side was black and shimmering and the other brown and matt.

  There was a tradition that people about to be executed were given special treatment. The day before the execution they were customarily given a lavish meal. On the execution ground, as Algernon Freeman-Mitford (grandfather of the Mitford sisters) observed when he was residing in Beijing: ‘Nothing could exceed the kindness of the officials, one and all, to the condemned men. They were giving them smokes out of their pipes, tea, and wine; even the wretched murderer, who was struggling and fighting between two soldiers, was only asked to “be quiet, be quiet,” in spite of all provocation . . . I was specially struck by the excessive kindness of the soldiery to the criminals.’

  Tiejun knew that his treatment was a prelude to execution. But he chatted and joked, showing not a hint of unease. The sentence of death arrived on 1 September in the form of a coded cable from General Yuan, who had gone to Beijing after interrogating his prisoners. The cable ordered the barracks to execute the men immediately and then confirm by return cable within one hour. In Tiejun’s case, the court-martial judge showed him the cable and offered him the option of taking his own life. Tiejun asked for poison and died a painful death. He was buried in a nearby unmarked mass grave for executed criminals. The barracks were told to say to anyone who enquired that he had died of a sudden sickness.

  Ironically, it was on the same day that Cixi proclaimed her intention to establish a constitutional monarchy. General Yuan had gone to Beijing to help draft the proclamation, and his order for the conspirators to die followed several audiences with the empress dowager. There is little doubt that it was Cixi who authorised the death sentences.

  The death of Tiejun was only reported in one newspaper and drew little attention. As in the case of the bomb operator, Tiejun’s own master, Wild Fox Kang, had as much incentive to keep the whole thing secret as General Yuan or Cixi did. The fact that Tiejun took his own life made a difference. He had been cooperative because he had actually changed his mind about his mission. In a letter to Kang before his arrest, he had asked the Wild Fox to stop pressing him to carry out his task, saying that they should abandon assassination and, instead, try to assist Cixi in her reforms. On the day before his capture, he had written to friends: ‘Don’t make any move . . . use peaceful means from now on . . .’ But he was not reprieved. Perhaps he would not collaborate and inform on his co-conspirators? Or perhaps Cixi was unwilling to take chances.

  She was not paranoid, though. The route she took between the palaces remained the same. One snowy day, travelling in a sedan-chair from the Summer Palace to the city, one of her chair-bearers slipped and threw her to the ground. Alive to rumours of assassins, her entourage was panic-stricken, fearing this was part of some deadly plot. ‘See if she is still alive,’ cried terrified court ladies, and her lady-in-waiting, Der Ling, rushed to her side. She found Cixi ‘sitting there composedly giving orders to the chief eunuch not to punish this chair-bearer, for he was not to blame, the stones being wet and very slippery’.fn2 There is no evidence that Cixi ever punished anyone purely on suspicion that they were involved in an assassination conspiracy.

  Japan, where the assassins were based, was the focus of Cixi’s mistrust. Her dread intensified after 1905, when Japan emerged victoriously in the Russo-Japanese War.

  Russia had occupied parts of Manchuria during the Boxer turmoil in 1900, taking advantage of the fact that mobs had assaulted some Russians there. According to the Russian politician and diplomat, Count Witte, ‘On the day when the news of the rebellion reached the capital, Minister of War Kuropatkin came to see me at my office in the Ministry of Finances. He was beaming with joy.’ And he proceeded to tell the count, ‘I am very glad. This will give us an excuse for seizing Manchuria.’ After the Boxer Protocol was signed, foreign troops withdrew from China, but the Russians refused to leave Manchuria – which Count Witte called ‘treacherous’. Japan had long coveted the place itself and went to war against Russia. During the war, fought on Chinese soil by two foreign powers, Cixi declared China to be neutral. It was a humiliating position, but she had no better alternative. She prayed for minimal damage to her empire, in her private chapel accessed by way of hidden stairs behind her bed. When Japan won the war, many Chinese felt elated, as though Japan’s victory were theirs. A ‘small’ Asiatic state had defeated a big European power and shattered the assumption that Europeans were superior to Asians, and the White race to the Yellow. Japan was glorified to an unprecedented degree. But for Cixi, Japanese victory only raised the spectre that, with its new confidence and strength, Japan would soon turn a predatory eye on China. This sense of impending crisis gave her an added impetus to transform the country into a constitutional monarchy, and her mind was made up right after the Japanese win in 1905. She hoped that the population would be more patriotic as citizens.

  Her apprehensions about Japan were well justified. Japan quickly embarked on a series of diplomatic offensives to gain the powers’ connivance in its designs on China, and signed deals wit
h Britain, France and even Russia. Japanese diplomats intensified their persuasion campaign among Chinese officials and newspaper owners and editors, selling the notion that the two Asian countries should really form a ‘union’. Many listened favourably, even though Japan was bound to dominate such a union, in reality if not in name. Chinese who had been to Japan were impressed by what they saw: ‘the tidiness of the streets, the wellbeing of the people, the honesty of the merchants, and the work ethic of the average man’. It was also well known among European diplomats that Japan was spending the equivalent of six to eight million German marks a year (roughly two to three million taels) cultivating useful people, with ‘the ultimate goal of moving the emperor of Japan to Beijing’, at least figuratively. Confidently, some Japanese asked the rhetorical question: ‘Why can’t 50 million Japanese do what 8 million Manchus had done [to the Chinese]?’

  Cixi had no desire to allow Tokyo to dominate her empire. Nor did she have any illusion that Japanese domination would make China a better place. In Korea, which Japan had put under its ‘protection’ after it defeated China in 1894–5, Japanese rule was brutal. At a time when the Chinese press was enjoying unfettered freedom, the Korean press was strictly censored to eradicate any hint of anti-Japanese sentiment. An outspoken newspaper editor, Yang Ki-Tak, who was editing a British-owned Korean-language paper, was arrested and confined to a cell that was ‘so crowded that he could not lie down yet whose ceiling was too low that he could not stand up’. After a few weeks he had been reduced to a skeleton. The British Consul-General in Korea, Henry Cockburn, was shocked and went to protest to a senior Japanese official. The official was wholly unmoved and told Cockburn that if he ‘persisted in dwelling on so trivial a side issue, it must be because [he] was inspired by an unfriendly wish to interpose obstacles in the Japanese path’. Outraged by the incident and appalled that Britain was ignoring the brutality of Japanese rule, Cockburn resigned, cutting short a promising diplomatic career.

  Cixi had no automatic preference for the yellow Japanese over the white Europeans. Skin colour did not preoccupy her and she was not given to racial prejudice. Her foreign friends included white Americans – Sarah Conger and Katharine Carl – the half-American, half-Chinese Louisa Pierson, and Uchida Kōsai, the wife of the Japanese minister.

  Her wariness towards Japan did not push the empress dowager into the arms of any other power, as it might have done. Her government declined to have any foreign adviser for the throne, although it employed many Japanese and Western advisers in the ministries and provinces. In 1906, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, sent her a message via the departing Chinese minister in Berlin, offering to form ‘an Entente Cordiale, which would guarantee the most important parts of China’ in the event of a Japanese attack. Cixi did not reply. After experiencing Russia’s treachery she had no illusion about any such guarantees. Least of all did she have any trust in the Kaiser, who had, after all, spearheaded the scramble for China. The Kaiser’s expression of concern was itself offensive to her, as he called a Japan–China union the ‘yellow peril’. The Kaiser would soon declare to a New York Times journalist: ‘the control of China by Japan . . . is sharply and bitterly antagonistic to the white man’s civilization. That would be [the] worst calamity . . . The future belongs to [the] white race; it does not belong to the yellow nor the black nor the olive-colored. It belongs to [the] blond man . . .’fn3

  Cixi’s total silence perplexed and frustrated the Kaiser – ‘It’s a year now. But nothing has been done. We must start working now! At once! Hurry up! . . . I explained to them a year ago . . . Obviously, their time is not money.’ And ‘China is so slow. They put everything off and then put it off again . . .’ The Kaiser tried to get America to sign up to his plan – and America was the only foreign country in which Cixi entertained a little hope. In late 1907, she received two pieces of encouraging news. America was returning the outstanding part of the Boxer Indemnity, and it was dispatching a major fleet into the Pacific. Seeing the proof of America’s friendliness towards China and its obvious intention to rival Japan, Cixi decided to send an emissary to America to explore possibilities to forge closer links, while conveying thanks for the return of the indemnity. The emissary would then visit Germany and other European countries. But the return of the indemnity was delayed and the emissary did not depart for a year. The fact that Cixi neither instructed her minister in Washington to talk about the Kaiser’s proposed Entente, nor dispatched a special emissary for this purpose, suggests that she did not regard it as a real possibility. America would not go to war with Japan on behalf of China; it was more likely to sacrifice China’s interest for its own. Indeed, before long, America also signed a deal with Japan, the Root–Takahira Agreement, by which America endorsed Japan’s dominance in southern Manchuria, in return for Japan’s acquiescence to America’s occupation of Hawaii and the Philippines.fn4

  In summer 1907, Japan all but completely annexed Korea. The Korean king was forced to abdicate in favour of his son: he had not been quite obedient enough to his Japanese ‘adviser’ – none other than former Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi. A new agreement between Korea and Japan now made Itō the Resident-General, and spelt out that the Korean king could not make any decision without his authorisation. Itō was to be assassinated by a Korean nationalist two years later, as he ‘won the hatred of the natives by harsh rule’, wrote the New York Times at the time of his death. Now his elevation to overlord of Korea only reminded Cixi that in 1898 this ‘principal figure in Japan’s rise as world power’ had come very close to controlling Emperor Guangxu, and that China had been in danger of becoming another Korea. In addition, now that Korea had effectively become Japanese territory, Japan had secured a land border with China, which its army could quite easily cross if it wished.

  Against this background, Cixi made a determined effort to clear her court of suspected Japanese agents. Her principal target was an army officer called Cen Chunxuan, who had escorted the court when it fled from Beijing in 1900. Cixi had been grateful and allowed him easy access to her. It had subsequently emerged, however, that Officer Cen, whose army was stationed far away from the capital, had raced to the court’s aid in defiance of his superior’s order; and that he had done so at the behest of Wild Fox Kang, with whom he had maintained clandestine ties, in order to protect Emperor Guangxu. She also learned that Officer Cen had had meetings in Shanghai with the Wild Fox’s associate, Liang, who had come over specially from Japan – meetings that Kang himself had planned to attend. Cixi gave Officer Cen ‘sick leave’. She also transferred his close friend, Grand Councillor Lin Shaonian, out of Beijing to Henan province to be its governor. On ‘sick leave’ in Shanghai, Officer Cen continued to meet senior Japanese politicians, including Inukai Tsuyoshi, the future Prime Minister who led Japan in the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 – and who was now the most active supporter of both Wild Fox Kang and Sun Yat-sen.

  Cixi reorganised the Grand Council and appointed three new Grand Councillors, who, she was sure, would not be Japanese stooges. One was General Yuan, whom Cixi made the head of the Foreign Office, even though he was described by a foreigner as having ‘less poise than other Chinese dignitaries’. The General was one of Japan’s biggest fans and had ordered all new officials reporting to him to travel there for three months before taking up their posts. But he was also tough and astute in his dealings with the Japanese, and had long been vigilant against Japan’s ambitions towards China. As such, he had been a thorn in the side of Tokyo, and Wild Fox Kang made him the prime target for assassination after Cixi.fn5

  The second new Grand Councillor was Viceroy Zhang, another admirer of Japan. In spite of his dalliance with Tokyo in 1900, Cixi trusted his commitment to an independent China, and his strong character which meant he would not be anyone’s puppet. His incorruptibility also meant that he was bribery-proof.

  The third new Grand Councillor was Zaifeng, the son of her old devotee Prince Chun. Cixi was in fact grooming him to be her successor. When th
e Boxer Protocol demanded that a Chinese prince be sent to the German court to apologise for the murder of Baron von Ketteler, Zaifeng was chosen for the task at the age of eighteen. He handled the difficult mission well and showed quiet dignity when he delivered China’s apology, having rejected Berlin’s demand that he and his suite perform the kowtow to the Kaiser – a demand that Berlin eventually withdrew. After his return to Beijing, Cixi arranged a marriage for him to the daughter of Junglu, one of the men closest to her.fn6 She gave Zaifeng as much exposure to foreign affairs as possible, sending him at every opportunity to represent the government at public functions involving foreigners. He knew the diplomatic corps and the missionaries better than most Chinese. Westerners liked him, and he mixed easily with them. Cixi had faith in him and believed that he would not be a Japanese collaborator – and he did not let her down. When Zaifeng eventually took over as Regent, after Cixi died and his son, Puyi, became the emperor, he resisted all Japanese overtures.fn7 When his son was crowned Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, Zaifeng visited him only once in the fourteen years of Manchukuo’s existence. He stayed for a month and steered clear of politics. (He died in 1951.)

  One of Japan’s key agents was Prince Su, a scion of the ruling Aisin-Gioro family. Around forty years old at this time, the prince was the most Japanised grandee, and a supporter of Emperor Guangxu. In his mansion he set up a school for his daughters and other women of the household, and had them taught by a Japanese. As the prince appeared to be an able and open-minded man, Cixi made him Chief of Police. The adviser to the police was a Japanese, Kawashima Naniwa, who had demonstrated considerable effectiveness when policing the capital during its occupation by foreign troops in the aftermath of the Boxer mayhem. The two men became good friends, and Kawashima later adopted one of Prince Su’s daughters. Growing up in Japan, she became a star spy for the Japanese during their invasion of China in the Second World War, and acquired the sobriquet Eastern Jewel. She would be executed for treason after the war.