Day: September 3, 2020

Managing an Empire when you obtain the reins of power; the story of Empress Cixi

America is following the same sort of evolution that all nations experience. And as the United States sunsets into the mire of folly and corruption, I find myself musing about the past and other historical precedents. I’ve looked at Germany, and Rome. I’ve looked at some of the more promising nations in South America, and I’ve looked at some of the amazing stories from China. From what I can tell, stability in a nation requires a combination of skills. Some of which might include intelligence, but it certainly includes both emotional / social skills and a degree of ruthlessness in use.

Here we look at Empress CiXi.

She is a well-known historical figure, well at least by the Chinese. She is virtually unknown in the West, and if you were to ask any of the Portland Protestors about her, they wouldn’t have a clue as to what you were talking about.

This is a reprint of the article titled “Empress Cixi Brought China Into The Modern Age — And Wasn’t Afraid To Kill Her Enemies” written by James Burch and published on October 14, 2019. It has been reformatted to fit this venue and all credit to the original author.

Empress Cixi Brought China Into The Modern Age — And Wasn’t Afraid To Kill Her Enemies

Some suspect that Cixi killed her dead son’s pregnant wife so she wouldn’t have to compete for power with a legitimate heir.

Within Beijing’s Forbidden City, beyond the imposing gates and the great halls, lie the buildings that once housed the emperor’s harem, an institution that evokes a time of oppression. But it was out of these quarters that a woman born in obscurity and confined as a concubine came to transform the world’s most populous empire.

History long depicted the Empress Dowager Cixi as a scheming despot who brought her country to ruin. But this scapegoating is not only simplistic, it’s inaccurate, as the flawed but skilled de facto ruler brought China into the modern age.

Wikimedia Commons; Cixi in c. 1890, when she was around 55 years old. This photo was taken by court photographer Yu Xunling and colorized by Imperial Court painters.

Cixi: Teenage Concubine

The girl who would one day be called Cixi was born in 1835 to the Yehenara clan. Her father seems to have been a regional administrator, although reliable details about her family and early life are lacking. The Yehenara, like the Qing dynasty rulers, were ethnically Manchu, which afforded them special status above the Han Chinese majority.

At age 16, she stood before the Xianfeng Emperor and was chosen for his harem, assigned to the lowest rank. In the Qing Empire, life as an imperial courtesan carried more prestige than you might imagine. It certainly offered more security than most people had during her lifetime. As concubine, she received the title “Noble Lady Lan.”

Wikimedia Commons – The Xianfeng Emperor was without a son until Cixi came along as a concubine.

Two years into his reign, the emperor had inherited a country in crisis. The Taiping Rebellion, a civil war on an apocalyptic scale, had begun across China and would ultimately leave at least 20 million dead — twice the death toll of World War I.

Capital Of A Suffering Empire

In 1856, Cixi ensured her influence in the emperor’s court after giving birth to his only son and heir. Soon enough, she was the second highest ranking woman in the palace. Nonetheless, her son would officially belong to her superior, the Empress Zhen.

The Xianfeng era was not going well. In addition to the endless civil wars, Great Britain continued to push back against Qing Dynasty isolationism. In 1856, allied with France, the British again went to war with China.

In 1858, the imperial court fled from the Anglo-French forces, who took the capital and looted and burned the emperor’s Summer Palaces.

Wikimedia Commons – China suffered a defeat to the Anglo-French forces in this battle of the Second Opium War, 1860.

The Xianfeng Emperor died in 1861, leaving the empire in a precarious position. In this context, during the royal court’s exile in Rehe province, the newly titled Empress Dowager Cixi, began her consolidation of power.

Filling The Power Vacuum

According to the dying wishes of the Xianfeng Emperor, eight high ministers would form a Grand Council to advise his five-year-old successor, the Tongzhi Emperor. Cixi, meanwhile, had formed an alliance with a higher-ranking colleague, now the Empress Dowager Ci’an. They maintained that they were to be the boy emperor’s official co-regents, with the power to approve or reject any edict.

The empresses dowager went ahead to Beijing ahead of the funeral cortege. They received the cooperation of Prince Gong, one of the late emperor’s brothers and a believer in modernization. Cixi, Ci’an, and Prince Gong staged a coup and led charges of disloyalty by three ministers they deemed to be hostile to their own power base.

Cixi intervened on behalf of the condemned, reducing their sentences from death by slow cutting, to decapitation for one, and suicide by strangulation for the others.

Prince Gong in 1860, as photographed by Felice Beato.

Three Rulers And A Puppet

The senior Empress Dowager Ci’an would oversee the palace, while Cixi took the lead in affairs of state and politics. Prince Gong was the visible face of the trio, since decorum required that Cixi listen to meetings from out of sight. The young Tongzhi Emperor retreated from public affairs during his upbringing.

The young Tongzhi Emperor disliked studies.

The terms of peace after the Second Opium War punished China. Western countries now could establish enclaves along China’s coast. But the Qing court could enlist the help of the French and British in fighting the Taiping rebels. Cixi encouraged the adoption of foreign military technology and guidance.

A new school, the Tongwen Guan, taught international languages and science. Cixi favored many proposals for industrialization and modernization, collectively known as the Self-Strengthening Movement, although she opposed railroads, saying the noise disturbed the dead.

Cixi had developed a close, and perhaps romantic, friendship with An Dehai, one of her eunuch attendants. The favor she showed him did not sit well with Prince Gong and court officials. In 1869, they had the man beheaded.

The Tongzhi Emperor came to rule in his own right at age 17, but had less interest in governing than in sheer entertainment. When he dismissed Prince Gong from his court, he received a stern, protocol-breaking lecture from Cixi and Ci’an, and their ally was reinstated.

An Dehai, the Empress Dowager Cixi’s favorite eunuch, was beheaded by Prince Gong and his allies. Cixi apparently did nothing to stop them.

The Tongzhi Emperor died at age 18, and rumors suggested syphilis as the cause, given his multiple affairs with prostitutes. Modern review has ruled that out, but the gossip is a measure of his public image.

Surprising Reversals

Cixi hadn’t gotten along with her son’s wife, the Empress Xiaozheyi, who regarded the former concubine as an inferior. Suspiciously, Xiaozheyi died very soon after her husband, along with her unborn child.

Cixi then adopted her three-year-old nephew, who became the Guangxu Emperor. Oddly, she ordered him to call her his “royal father.” Ci’an emerged as the principal regent of the period, as Cixi was suffering bad health. But in 1881, Ci’an herself died of a stroke. Cixi was again in command.

The Guangxu Emperor assumed power at age 18 in 1889, and Cixi nominally went into retirement on the outskirts of Beijing, though foreign governments sometimes wrote to Cixi directly, bypassing the emperor.

The Empress Dowager (center) with courtiers in 1902, the year following the Boxer Rebellion. Empress Xiaodingjing stands second from left. Yu Xunling, photographer.

In 1898, Cixi opposed a rapid modernization program, called the Hundred Days’ Reform. Advocated by the emperor and his advisors, the plan proposed a constitutional monarchy.

Cixi worked to block the reforms, and to remove the reformers, executing those who didn’t manage to escape first. The Guangxu Emperor was placed under house arrest on an island adjacent to the Forbidden City, and would never again wield power.

Anti-foreign sentiment in China coalesced into the Boxer Rebellion, named for its organization’s martial arts practices. In another turn, Cixi expressed sympathy with the movement. In 1900, militias attacked the coastal mini-colonies. Following the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion, Cixi publicly apologized for supporting it, and China made restitution payments to the countries affected.

Cixi now changed course again, advocating for a limited monarchy. She stood for photographs and painted portraits in a kind of charm offensive, offering prints to palace visitors.

But as her health failed, Cixi arranged that yet another child would be next in line for the throne, a declaration she made from her deathbed before her death on Nov. 15, 1908. Just the previous day, the Guangxu Emperor had himself died of arsenic poisoning. Cixi was buried in a palatial tomb east of the capital.

Upon hearing the news of the deaths, anarchist Wu Zhihui referred to Cixi and her nephew as a “vermin empress and vermin emperor” whose “lingering stench makes me vomit.”

This portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi was painted in 1905 by Dutch artist Hubert Vos.

Self-Serving Usurper Or Brilliant Leader?

In the Republic of China, Cixi was a target for contempt. Her image in the English-speaking world was colored by the book China Under the Empress Dowager, written by John Otway Percy Bland, a journalist, and Edmund Backhouse, an utter fraud, whose fantastical stories Bland chose not to question.

The early Chinese Communist Party had no love for any “feudal” tyrants. Only in the 1970s did anyone question the melodramatic caricature of Cixi as a “Dragon Lady,” an unfortunate nickname that remains.

Modern historians credit the Empress Dowager Cixi for pulling China through difficult times, while others vilify her for her numerous executions and opposition to crucial reforms that would have risked her own hold on power. It’s remarkable that she held onto power for 45 years — but at what cost?

Conclusion

You have just learned about the life of those in power.

Do you actually believe that things are different today?

Oh you might call the type of governance different, and you might have different technologies, and different societal constructs, but the fact remains that the lifestyles of the wealthy, the famous, the rulers and their first tier actuators do not resemble ANYTHING like the subjects that they rule over.

It doesn’t matter if the year is 1908…

Or 2008.

There is a fundamental change in the personality of a person who obtains power. We say that they are “corrupted”, but that’s not really accurate. They change.

They change.

They become something different.

This different “thing” can be monstrous or glorious or something in-between, but they do and actually change.

As such…

You cannot expect them to think as you do. You cannot expect them to experience life as you do. You cannot expect them to understand you, your needs or the relationships that you have with your friends, or your industry or your pastimes. For that all is alien to them.

They might as well be from another planet.

If mankind is going to advance in any way, we have to recognize that power changes humans into something else. And that once a person in put in charge of the reigns of power they can NEVER return back to a “normal” state of life. And for the world to be a better place; one where humanity interacts peacefully and coexists with the environment, we must recognize that power is too dangerous to entrust to individual humans. And that for proper and safe governance, some other system must be put in place that differs SUBSTANTIALLY from any other system already implemented on the planet.

Ponder a spell about the implications of that.

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A few warnings about what is happening from people who have been there, and see America through the lens of experience.

Yesterday, I published a post by a Hard-Right conservative Russian who had some dire warnings for America and Americans. I published it with some caveats, as some of his terminology was repugnant to my readership (and me). Never the less, if you distill everything, he had something good to say.

He said “Organize”.

Now, I took his article and massaged it with Metallic finesse. And I laid it all out that it is the PTB (sitting comfortably in their mansions) that are the enemy. They want us to fight among ourselves.

Don’t.

To which I (sort of) twisted his message. I said yes, we must organize. But, organize, on both sides. Come together on both sides. Fight against the common enemy the PTB that are causing all this turmoil in the first place.

And that was my message.

The way for humanity to get through this trying and difficult time is to work together and subdue the evil psychopaths that have hoarded all the gold and are using it to destroy humanity and remake it in THEIR image.

Well…

Now let’s give equal time to some words of wisdom from the Left. And yes, I’m going to twist this message in a metallic way as well…

“We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying.”

The title for this comes from Umair Haque, who has seen what is happening here now in America, and warns that those who have seen the end result elsewhere first hand are being ignored. He is crying out to be heard.

We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying.

We Survivors of Authoritarianism Have a Message America Needs to Hear: This is Exactly How it Happens, and It’s Happening Here.

…We survivors of authoritarianism have a terrible, terrible foreboding, because we are experiencing something we should never do: deja vu. Our parents fled from collapsing societies to America. And here, now, in a grim and eerie repeat of history, we see the scenes of our childhoods played out all over again. Only now, in the land that we came to. We see the stories our parents recounted to us happening before our eyes, only this time, in the place they brought us to, to escape from all those horrors, abuses, and depredations.

We survivors are experiencing this terrible feeling of deja vu right now as a group, as a class. We talk about it, how eerie and grim this sense of deja vu is. It’s happening all over again! Do you remember this part of your childhood? When the armed men roamed the streets? When the secret police disappeared opponents? When the fascist masses united — and that was enough to destroy democracy for good? We talk about it, believe me — but you don’t hear it because we have no real voice. America’s pundits are named Chris and Jake and Tucker. They are not named Eduardo and Ravi and Xiao and Umair. But Chris and Jake and Tucker can’t help you now. They don’t know what the hell they’re dealing with. They literally have no idea because they have no experience whatsoever.

The only people who do right now in America are us survivors. Let me remind you, by the way, what happens we speak out: we lose whatever credibility and status we have. The moment I began to warn of this, I lost my column in HBR, my cable news appearances, and so forth. Don’t cry for me. Understand me, my friend, know me. If we had a voice, we survivors, we would be warning you as loudly and strongly as we possibly could.

All of us. We would say:

This is not a joke. This is not a drill. When we survivors of authoritarianism experience, as a group, a class, a cohort, something that we never, ever should — the horrific deja vu that the horrors of our childhoods, that our parents knew, are happening, all over again, here, something is much, much more wrong than you know.

This is what four more years looks like.

READ THE WHOLE THING. It may be the most important thing you read all day or all week or all month.

Consider just this one warning:

Why? They point to the complete breakdown of the rule of law. The rule of law only means something when an authoritarian can’t simply disappear people from the streets, ordering his paramilitary to do it, ignoring the constitution, discarding due process — with total impunity. But all that is exactly what Trump can do.

He now has the nascent powers of a Gaddafi or a Saddam. No, I’m not kidding. He doesn’t have the full powers, to be sure — but he certainly has the beginnings of them. Maybe he can’t have people tortured in jail yet — but he can have almost anyone he likes in America picked up and disappeared.

So how far away do you think even worse abuses of power are? When a tyrant can have almost anyone in a country they like disappeared, how far away do you really think torture is? Rape? Murder? I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m trying to speak to you like an adult. Will you listen?

Those words take on real urgency when you see something like this coming from the Trump administration.

Via Talking Points Memo:

Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf stated that the Justice Department is looking into arresting leaders of Black Lives Matter (BLM) amid protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake by police officer Rusten Sheskey.

“Do you think the Department of Homeland Security is getting the help it needs from the Justice Department?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked. “Why haven’t we seen the leaders of antifa and BLM arrested and charged for conspiracy under, say, [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law], like the heads of the mafia families were?”

“This is something I talked to the AG personally about and I know that they are working on it,” Wolf replied, referring to Attorney General Bill Barr.

The DHS chief also stated that the Justice Department is “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.”

Carlson pressed Wolf on why the “funders” of the anti-police brutality protests “haven’t been punished.”

“Again, I would say that again the Department of Justice, who has the lead in all of those investigations, are certainly moving as quickly as possible,” Wolf said.

There is no evidence that the protesters are being paid by BLM leaders or anyone else, for that matter, nor is there evidence that BLM is directly responsible for violence at the protests.

It can happen here. It IS happening here.

Conclusion

That was the Hard-Left message.

Both the Hard-Right and the Hard-Left narratives are dripping with emotion and angst. Both are yelling at Americans. Both are saying “Wake Up!” Things can go really, really bad.

The Hard-Right offered a solution; Organize.

The Hard-Left also offered a solution; Embrace democracy more.

Scene from Aliens. You need to know what you are dealing with before your rush in and try to improve upon it.

Hum. Do you see where I am going with this? Both sides are correct. Both sides see that there is a problem. Both sides are terrified with what might happen. Both sides are concerned and offer solutions. But what are they?

More democracy.

WTF?

What is going on.

In both cases the people on both sides of the political spectrum look at the same failed model for answers and solutions. They look towards “democracy” to be the savior in this issue and the means to stop this mess.

It's like sheep that are unhappy with their lot in life. They look at the field next door. They see the taller, and greener grass, and the the other sheep, and they want to revolt and be like that other farm. They want to exchange their shepherd for another shepherd.

Here’s a big secret for you all…

“Democracy” is NOT the answer.

All democracies turn into oligarchies. And oligarchies turn into military empires. With various political solutions cropping up from time to time. 

It's pretty well discussed. You all should read the Federalist Papers. The founders of the United States pretty much laid all this out for everyone to see. No one listened, of course. But it is the historical record.

So what is the answer?

Well, if I were to wave a magic wand, and place an ideal governance upon the United States, the LAST thing that I would do is have a democracy.

Democracy is a failed model. It has an expiration date; a “half-life” before it devolves into something else.

No.

Democracy is the LAST thing that you want.

You want something else.

  • You want small government. That way it can be participative.
  • You want quick and responsive “feed back mechanisms” on the local level.
  • You want management by merit and ability.
  • You want rotating management with short terms of office.

Now, I can tell you what you do not want…

  • You don’t want the same system with different ideologies.
  • You don’t want a larger system.
  • You don’t want a bigger, more powerful system.
  • You don’t want a militarized system.

Now, China is doing it right. For how long is unknown. I do not know how long this current bout of Chinese governance will last for. But I do know that it shows the rest of the world that [1] things CAN be governed by merit over popularity. That [2] small levels of governance at the local level does work, and [3] that a policing mechanism for the leadership ranks (the Corruption Police) is necessary to control fraud.

So right now, in these early stages of the popular American revolt, everyone is thinking about changing the individuals and their party platforms that comprise the government. They are not talking about changing the way the government operates.

And they should.

Nothing will change otherwise.

If you want real change, real substantive change, then you need to nuke it all from orbit and start from scratch all over again.

Ripley meme.

Do you want more?

Do you want to see similar posts?

I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…

SHTF Articles

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.