Empress Dowager Cixi Quotes
I regret and grieve over the late troubles. It was a grave mistake, and China will hereafter be a friend of foreigners. No such affair will happen again. China will protect the foreigner, and we hope to be friends in the future.
See {641838} for a quote about the policies that she came to regret.
Cixi, 1835–1908, Empress Dowager of China, Statement to Sarah Conger about her decision not to try and prevent the Boxers from attacking foreigners, 1902
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This absolute ruler concluded that single person judgment with advisors has not as sound as a system of open discussion and institutions affecting policy decisions and administration. She herself had made errors and admitted it—see {641730}.
The “Boxer Rebellion” was a very strong, populist, violent movement in China at the turn of the Century. The hostility was not directed against the Empress or the Government, but against the non-Chinese foreigners who were, theoretically and by treaty, under the protection of the Chinese Government. Cixi and the government had to decide to Crack Down on the Boxers, Support them, or remain passive. The movement was so strong and the government so weak, that is was not clear that the government could prevail in what would amount to a civil war. The Empress in effect vetoed the crackdown option on the grounds stated. With this quotation she made a fateful decision for China and the Foreigners and for her own legacy. She had been considered by Westerners one of the great rulers of the world of not of all time, and she was in many ways. But she made the wrong choice from the Western point of view; thousands of Westerners became casualties of the Boxer irrational xenophobic violence with the government doing little to stop it. Soon, she herself came to regret this policy decision--{641730}.
Empress Dowager Cixi was a Chinese empress dowager and regent who was the de facto supreme ruler of China in the late Qing dynasty for 47 years, from 1861 until her death in 1908. Of the Manchu Yehe Nara clan, she was elected as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor in her adolescence and gave birth to a son, Zaichun, in 1856. After the Xianfeng Emperor's death in 1861, the young boy became the Tongzhi Emperor, and she became the Empress Dowager. Cixi ousted a group of regents appointed by the late emperor and assumed regency, which she shared with Empress Dowager Ci'an. Cixi then consolidated control over the dynasty when she installed her nephew as the Guangxu Emperor at the death of the Tongzhi Emperor in 1875, contrary to the traditional rules of succession of the Qing dynasty that had ruled China since 1644.
