This Week in China’s History: Cixi Steps Out from Behind the Screen

January 27, 1902

The highest levels of power have usually been dominated by men. This is no less true of China than other countries. Like the United States, the People’s Republic of China sits on a list of countries that have never been led by a woman. Even before the PRC, no woman had led the Chinese state since Wu Zetian was monarch of the Tang dynasty in the 8th century; her daughter attempted to succeed her mother on the throne in a coup that failed, as I detailed in an earlier column. Since then, China’s leaders have been only men. Tsai Ying-wen, of course, served two terms as President of Taiwan — the Republic of China — from 2016 until 2024, but her presidency was not recognized on the mainland.

One common asterisk surrounding this assertion is the Dowager Empress Cixi. Cixi exercised real power starting in 1861 and was de facto ruler of the Qing dynasty from then until its fall in 1911. She was known to rule, literally, “from behind a screen”: a yellow silk screen hid her from view while she sat behind the throne, guiding the emperor’s conversation and steering the affairs of state, though not in her own name. Cixi was often vilified and caricatured as a “Dragon Lady,” but her role in Qing politics was complex. And what her role says about gender at the highest level of politics in China is ambiguous: does her very presence undermine the claim that power was inaccessible to women, or does the fact that she acted through or behind men like her husband or nephews make that point even more strongly?

There are good arguments to be made for both positions. But what is less widely known is that Cixi herself took stands to assert her own authority, independent of her emperor, in ways that challenge conventional understandings of what her rule meant and what “Confucian” cultures would tolerate.