Was Cixi a moderniser or arch-conservative femme fatale who presided over China's collapse? This question was raised by best-selling author Jung Chang in a speech this week based on her new book . The answer is neither.

Having already decided against Cixi, I had little interest in the topic until author Angelo Paratico trashed Chang's book in a op-ed this week. As it is, I think they are both wrong. Cixi is best understood as alternating between being a piecemeal reformer and arch-conservative throughout her career, which spanned five decades, depending on political circumstances. Whenever she introduced reform, it was too little too late, or just wrong-headed, such as when, in 1905, she abolished the centuries-old civil service examinations and undercut whatever support was left for her from the wealthy elite.

To see the extent of her failure, you need only compare Cixi with the Japanese Emperor Meiji, whose reign roughly coincided with hers but was one which propelled a nation's rise rather than setting it on the path to collapse. When she played the reformer, she in fact shared many of Meiji's ideas, just as her right-hand man Li Hongzhang was a mirror image of Ito Hirobumi, the architect of the Meiji Restoration: learning from Western industrialisation, science and technology while preserving the superior Chinese culture.