Empress Dowager Cixi Quotes
We must keep decision-making in our own hands when we employ foreign personnel. Don’t let foreigners control everything and make crucial decisions for us.
This model has been used by many counties even into the 21st century to get the benefits of foreign know how and capital while preventing the foreign businesses to control parts of the nation and the economy. In this case, Cixi had allowed a telegraph company and two modern coal mining areas. The system works well provided the foreign interests do not bribe the native administrators who are appointed to oversee the activity. It takes two for bribery and other forms of corruption to work and unfortunately, Cixi ruled a culture where corruption, petty and large, was pervasive and traditional.
Cixi, 1835–1908, Empress Dowager of China, Decree Regarding Foreign Business Interests which she allowed to function in China, 1875
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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.
