Jung CHANG's New Book on Cixi

choi

Te-Ping Chen, Jung Chang Rewrites an Empress. China Real Time, Oct 3, 2013.
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealti ... ewrites-an-empress/
Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi; The concubine who Launched modern China. Random House, 2013)

Note:
(a) "Jung Chang has finally found a heroine she can believe in."

It is a wordplay on
Barack Obama, Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise. Three Rivers Press, 2008.

(b) "Instead of casting the empress as a grasping, power-mad tyrant, as she is commonly perceived, the book hails Cixi as a figure who helped usher China into the 20th century."
(i) Cixi (1835-1908)
(ii) Guangxu Emperor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxu_Emperor
(1871-1908; reign 1975-1908)

Quote: "The medical records kept by the Guangxu Emperor's physician indicate the emperor suffered from 'spells of violent stomachache,' and that his face would turn blue, typical symptoms of arsenic poisoning. * * * On Nov 4, 2008, forensic tests revealed that the level of arsenic in the Guangxu Emperor's remains was 2,000 times higher than that of ordinary people. Scientists concluded that the poison could only be administered in a high dose one time. China Daily quoted a historian, Dai Yi, who speculated that Cixi may have known of her imminent death and may have worried that Guangxu would continue his reforms after her death.

(ii) grasping (adj):
"desiring material possessions urgently and excessively and often to the point of ruthlessness"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grasping
(c) "And the last project she embarked on, which was unfortunately cut short by her untimely death, was to introduce China into a constitutional monarchy, which means an open parliament with an upper house and lower house, and to give the vote to the Chinese people on the basis of the franchise—comparable to the franchise in the West."

franchise (n); Middle English, from Anglo-French, from franchir to free, from franc free — more at FRANK):
"a constitutional or statutory right or privilege; especially :  the right to vote"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/franchise

(d) Cixi "as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population"
(i) demographics of Chinah
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
(In 1910, the population of China was almost a quarter of world population according to census)

There is no citation or number of China's and world's populations.
(ii) WW Rockhill, The 1910 Census of the Population of China. Bulletin of American Geographical Society (1912) 44: 668, 671
http://www.jstor.org/stable/200816?seq=1
("The population of the [Qing] Empire (exclusive of Mongolia and Tibet), computed with the present available data and in the manner above explained, would appear to be, in round numbers, 325,000,000")