Empress Dowager Cixi Quotes
Make China Strong. Make China String is the only way to ensure that foreign countries will not tart a conflict against us.
China, which had been one of the strongest and most modern nations in the world for 1000 years had lapsed into decay and though a huge nation, rich in resources, with more people than any other had been eclipsed by Japan, America and Europe. Cixi was determined to remedy that, and to a great extent started China on the road to modernization which would take over 100 years more.
Cixi, 1835–1908, Empress Dowager of China, Motto of her Reign & Frequent Statement
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
During her adult life, she was the de facto ruler of China. This quotation is very important because it gives us an important insight into Chinese motives and historical drivers. The first reason is something almost all countries and cultures can identify with, but the second--to avoid being looked down—was just as important. Americans are relatively uncaring what the citizens of other countries think about them, but the Chinese do. So do other nationalities and cultures like the Arabs, the Iranians, many of the South American cultures. Often it takes on a different world like “dignity” or “respect”.
In the aftermath of the Tienamen Square massacre of 1989, Congress voted economic sanctions against China:
Every major Western power and Japan were looking to control parts of China for their own mercantile advantage. The Emperor, her adopted son, had stated that under no circumstances would the Chinese fight, but Cixi issued this decree, in effect, overruling the Emperor—a remarkable occurrence.
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.
