Empress Dowager Cixi gets a makeover - regardless of the facts
Angelo Paratico says Jung Chang's book praising Empress Dowager Cixi as a reformer glosses over the fact that she was self-serving and ruthless
Yeung Kui-wan, a native of Dongguan but raised in Hong Kong, was a close collaborator of Sun Yat-sen, a great intellectual and a great patriot. He was shot at his Hong Kong home on January 10, 1901 by hitmen sent by the Qing government headed by Empress Dowager Cixi. He died in hospital the next day.
Yeung's name and the image of his grave in Happy Valley came to mind while reading Jung Chang's new book, , which has received glowing reviews all over the English-speaking world. The author is in Hong Kong this week to speak at the Foreign Correspondents' Club and the Asia Society.
Niccolò Machiavelli, the author of , wrote five centuries ago: "The tragedy of mankind is that we cannot find a man completely good or a man completely bad." Jung Chang, by her own admission, fell in love with her character and clearly decided to excuse all her crimes, praising Cixi's mettle and blind nationalism. With Hong Kong being a product of history, and history of a particular kind, clever distortions should not be welcomed.
Sun Yat-sen and Kang Youwei - a revolutionary thinker who saw the beheading, on Cixi's command, of his brother and several other friends - were both in favour of a reformed monarchy, while Yeung Kui-wan was a republican to the core.
Does Chang's affection for Cixi stem from the fact that she was vilified by Chinese Communists? If so, then she ignores the fact that she had been hated even more by Republicans and the Nationalists.
The book is undoubtedly well-written, both engaging and well structured, but it reads to me more like an apologia - in the classical sense of the term.
