Mid-term Sample Essays

Primary Source: China and the League of Nations

Essay 1

V.K. Wellington Koo’s speech advocating for Chinese participation in the League of Nations reflects a moment of cautious optimism in early Republican China, when political leaders attempted to secure national sovereignty through international cooperation rather than internal revolution or isolation. Speaking at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Koo framed China as always aligned with the ideals of global peace, democratic governance, and diplomacy, drawing heavily on Confucian philosophy to argue that the League’s principles were in fact compatible with Chinese traditions. Rather than presenting China as a passive recipient of Western modernization, the speech constructs a narrative in which China possessed its own philosophical foundation for international collaboration. This rhetorical strategy shows how Chinese diplomats aimed to combine tradition with modern global expectations while navigating a profoundly unequal international system that disadvantaged their nation.

Koo’s central argument is that China’s intellectual heritage already contained the moral principles behind collective security and international cooperation. By invoking philosophers such as Confucius, Mencius, and Mozi, he portrays Chinese civilization as historically committed to universal peace and democratic governance: “It is Confucius who first taught us that we must not be merely content with the orderly government of a single individual nation, but that, besides, we must seek for the establishment of what he termed ‘Tatungism,’ which means literally ‘great communism,’ figuratively ‘utopianism,’ and practically ‘a league of nations’” (Wang and Koo). In this framing, Confucian ideals are used as evidence that China naturally belongs within the new global order based on shared responsibility among countries. At a time when China’s sovereignty was compromised by unequal treaties and numerous concessions to foreign powers, the speech looks to position China as an equal partner rather than a backward state seeking admission into the Western world.

The intellectual strategy used here resembles earlier reformist efforts in late Qing China, where political actors attempted to reinterpret classical literature in ways that justified adaptation to new global conditions. The speech’s insistence that ancient Chinese philosophy anticipated the ideals of international cooperation reflects a larger pattern of Chinese elites using tradition as a catalyst for modernization instead of an obstacle. An example of this is Kang Youwei, a reformer who argued that Confucius was not a traditionalist, aiming to turn Confucianism into a national institution for political change (Zarrow 111). By presenting the League of Nations as fundamentally compatible with Chinese values, Koo tries to address the persistent concern among other Chinese reformers that embracing Western ideology might undermine the legitimacy of their nation’s culture.

Understanding the historical context of 1919 is essential for interpreting the speech’s meaning and limitations. Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the failure of the early republican government, Chinese leaders looked for new strategies to secure national strength and recognition. World War I seemed to offer such an opportunity. Many Chinese intellectuals believed that joining the Allied Powers would result in diplomatic equality on the global stage and a return of territory lost since the mid-19th century. The notion of collective security and national self-determination promoted by President Woodrow Wilson created expectations that a new international order might replace the dominant nineteenth century imperialism (Carter 118). Koo’s speech reflects this moment of hope, presenting the League as an institution capable of protecting both strong and weak nations.

However, subsequent events would prove that this optimism may have been misguided. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles ultimately allowed Japan to maintain control over German concessions in Shandong, despite Chinese expectations that their sovereignty would be restored. This decision triggered widespread protests that became known as the May Fourth Movement. Chinese students saw the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference as evidence that Western powers would continue to prioritize their imperial interests over principles of equality, even after China had supported the Allied war effort (Carter 118-119). When understood in the context of this historical development, Koo’s speech reveals a substantial miscalculation regarding the willingness of Western nations to treat China as an equal partner.

The speech’s emphasis on democracy further demonstrates the strategic positioning of Republican China within global political discourse. Koo asserts that “the Chinese people have been for centuries nurtured in the principles of democracy,” suggesting that modern republican governance simply represents a continuation of tradition (Wang and Koo). This argument addresses Western assumptions that China lacked the cultural foundation necessary for modern political institutions to be successful. By claiming that Chinese civilization historically valued the welfare of the people and democracy, Koo once again attempts to legitimize China’s republican movement in the eyes of international audiences. Yet, this portrayal simplifies the reality of domestic politics; at the time, control of the country was divided between conflicting warlords, and general political fragmentation undermined the state’s ability to act effectively. The post-imperial era created a political power vacuum marked by competing ideologies and instability, which limited China’s capacity to pursue many foreign policy goals (Saich 39).

The intended audience of the speech likely had significant influence on its language and structure. Addressed primarily to Western diplomats in attendance at the Conference, it carries a sense of universalism and emphasizes shared values. This explains the heavy reliance on concepts such as reason, justice, and cooperation, which were associated with contemporary liberal and internationalist ideals. Furthermore, Koo suggests that the national sentiment in China is one of widespread, popular support for the League. He states that “no people have been more eager to see the formation of a League of Nations than the people of China… They believe that just as a democratic form of government is a bulwark of the people’s rights, so will a democratic League of Nations be the best guarantee of the rights of all nations, great and small, weak and strong” (Wang and Koo). Whether this portrayal accurately represents public opinion is less important than its function as a diplomatic claim designed to improve China’s standing in the eyes of Western governments and increase their bargaining power.

Finally, the speech also shows a contradiction between idealism and political reality. Koo describes the League of Nations as an institution that is able to prevent war and ensure equality among states. However, the wider historical context suggests that such optimism underestimated the persistence of a stratified global order. The same conference that inspired hopes for collective security also reinforced existing power hierarchies. When taking into account this perspective, Koo’s speech demonstrates the difficulties faced by Chinese leaders who tried to use diplomacy as a method to achieve national rejuvenation.

Ultimately, Koo’s speech shows how early Republican statesmen combined reinterpretations of tradition and idealism to elevate China’s position in the world. By framing Confucian philosophy as a natural precursor to modern democracy and international cooperation, he attempted to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity while also convincing Western nations of China’s legitimacy. His speech is an example of the aspirations and vulnerabilities of Chinese diplomacy at a critical moment in the nation’s history. It reflects a belief that shared values could change global politics, even though subsequent developments indicated the limits of that belief. Therefore, in addition to emphasizing China’s diplomatic ambitions, it also documents its struggle to participate and gain credibility in the evolving international order.

Essay 2

V. K. Wellington Koo‘s speech defending Chinese support for the League of Nations is striking on its own terms. It becomes more striking once you know the context in which it was given—and stranger still when you notice the specific arguments he reaches for.

The immediately relevant context is China‘s role in World War I. China joined the Allies expecting, reasonably enough, that German colonial holdings centered around Qingdao would be returned to Chinese sovereignty. Woodrow Wilson‘s promises of national self-determination reinforced the expectation. At Versailles, those hopes were dashed: Britain, France, and the United States, as James Carter puts it, “bowed to realpolitik” and awarded Shandong to Japan, largely because Japan had political clout while China remained, in Carter‘s unsparing phrase, “internally divided and militarily weak.” That news reached China on May 1, 1919 and produced the protests we now call the May Fourth Movement—students organizing against Western imperialism, Japanese aggression, and China‘s own weakness, simultaneously. The Paris Peace Conference, where Koo gave his speech, was the exact forum in which he could make his claims and hope for them to be satisfied. The May Fourth protests lit a fire under those claims.

The structural weakness Koo was navigating deserves some elaboration. As Peter Zarrow shows, Chinese state capacity following the fall of the Qing in 1911 was rather precarious—competitive sovereignties within China, and Japan‘s “Twenty-One Demands“ making plain that the Japanese did not take Chinese sovereignty entirely seriously. Koo‘s speech was therefore an opportunity to appear before the world not as a supplicant but as an equal—as both a maker of China‘s own future and a participant in the future of international order. (It is worth noting, as the historiography increasingly suggests, that the picture of warlordism-as-chaos is rather overstated. Regional industries and distinct ways of life could flourish under warlord arrangements in ways a centralized state would not have permitted. The chaos framing tends to do more ideological work than descriptive work.)

The rhetoric of the speech tracks closely with this context. Erez Manela, in The Wilsonian Moment, describes Koo as a cosmopolitan nationalist—a nationalist precisely because of his cosmopolitanism. What this means, in practice, is that Koo performs a double move: he promotes the League of Nations while doing so in an idiom he codes as distinctly Chinese. He invokes Confucius, arguing that “the Chinese people have from time immemorial been influenced by the elevated principles of Confucian philosophy,” and that Confucius articulated something called “Tatungism”—which Koo glosses, with notable strain, as meaning “literally great communism, figuratively utopianism, and practically a league of nations.” The triple translation is revealing. Koo is not only arguing that China supports the League; he is arguing that China‘s deepest traditions already contain the moral prerequisites for international cooperation. The strain required to say so—three separate glosses to communicate a single concept—tells you something about how much interpretive labor the move requires. But the move itself is aimed squarely at Paris, to make ancient China and modern law appear similar.

Here, however, is where the speech becomes strange. The Confucian idiom Koo reaches for was, in 1919, not simply quaint—it was under attack. A reading of Lu Xun‘s “Kong Yiji” together with the broader legacy of the May Fourth movement makes the precariousness of Confucian ideals quite vivid. Kong Yiji is a scholar who “had studied the classics but had never passed the official examination”—he slides from copying work into occasional pilfering, insisting through his humiliation that “taking a book, the affair of a scholar, can‘t be considered stealing.” The character is allegorical: he represents the “sad decay of the old Confucian scholarly tradition,” a portrait of “China‘s crippled political culture… unequipped with any understanding of how to address the future.” In that domestic intellectual climate, how does one make sense of Koo putting Confucius at the center of an internationalist argument?

The simplest answer is that Koo is out of step with the most iconoclastic energies of his time. He even has to perform a creative reinterpretation to render Confucius palatable for a democratic context—noting, rather awkwardly, that “even Confucius, a confirmed royalist, emphasized the importance of placing the public weal of the State above the interests of the imperial household.” The qualification implies the broader problem. But the more likely explanation, and I think the more interesting one, is that Koo‘s Confucianism is aimed at a different audience than the May Fourth students were addressing. Confucius was the idiom through which the West already knew China—and if the Paris conference was not to be an exclusively Western affair, if it was to accommodate any Chinese modality at all, Koo needed to engage some recognizably Chinese frame. Just as the May Fourth movement was not simply about adopting pragmatism, democracy, and Western liberalism wholesale but about negotiating between Chinese and Western intellectual resources, Koo is doing something analogous at the diplomatic level. He is using Confucius as a traditional diplomatic move, calibrated for a foreign audience rather than a domestic one.

That audience distinction is, I think, crucial and often underappreciated. May Fourth students were mobilizing a domestic public—trying to shame officials, organize boycotts, and force a more assertive nationalism. Koo, by contrast, was speaking before foreign delegates in a setting where legitimacy was mediated through claims about civilization, moral capacity, and political modernity. His Confucian references function as a credence building exercise: China is not begging for favors; it is a civilization whose moral philosophy already contains universalist principles compatible with international law. His democratic language runs parallel—hoping that the League will become a “partnership of democratic nations“ and claiming that China has been “nurtured“ in democratic principles for centuries—and can be read as another outward-facing claim, designed to place China inside the moral boundaries of the postwar order.

What makes the speech striking, ultimately, is not that Koo supports the League. It is that he attempts to secure China‘s place in the new world order with a newfangled idiom: Wilsonian-democratic on one hand, Confucian-universalist on the other. Versailles had just demonstrated that China could not rely on great-power goodwill—that imperial military power could override principle with impunity. Yet Koo still insists that principle must be institutionalized, and that Chinese tradition can be made to speak that principle in a form foreign delegates might recognize. Read alongside May Fourth protests and May Fourth literature—Lu Xun‘s portraits of cultural decay, of tradition weighing and ultimately destroying the young—Koo‘s Confucius looks less like a straightforward domestic commitment than like a strategic resource, aimed at compelling foreign recognition of China‘s equality at precisely the moment that equality was being denied. Whether it worked is, of course, another matter entirely. It did not.

Secondary Source: 1644 Historiography

Essay 1

In 2025, the WeChat account “Zhejiang Publicity” of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC)” published an article “Beware of the 1644 Historical View” countering growing online interpretation of the Ming-Qing transition as the end of Chinese civilization. Proponents of the ‘1644 historical perspective’ argue that the fall of the Ming and the Qing conquest was a barbaric, foreign regime whose governance is to blame for China’s ‘century of humiliation’. The Party intervenes in this online discourse of historical interpretation, stipulating that the Qing was an integral and inalienable part of Chinese civilization and history, emphasizes the character of China as a unified multi-ethnic nation, and makes clear that dynastic and regime change does not equate to civilizational breakdown.

At its core, this article is not about the events of 1644, nor the conquest of the Qing. Instead, there is a larger debate for how China defines itself. Is China a continuous civilization, or a territorially unified multi-ethnic state? Is China an ethnic Han nation, as some think? By denouncing the ‘1644 historical view’, the Party seeks to defend contemporary sovereignty and legitimacy in a narrative of historical continuity that unifies China’s 56 recognized ethnic minority groups, and affirms the role of the Qing dynasty in shaping its history. This effort to secure unity as a prominent concept in Chinese identity and discourse reveals tensions between ethnic centrism, imperial inheritance, and importantly, competing visions of what defines and constitutes China as a nation today. This essay ultimately argues that the CPC’s rejection of the ‘1644 historical perspective’ serves not merely as a defense of rigor in historiography, but also a strategic assertion that “dynastic change is merely one segment in the long river of Chinese history, not a rupture and restart of civilization.”

As noted by the source, the ‘1644 historical view’ is rooted in long-standing historical anxieties over national weakness and foreign encroachment, particularly during the Chinese ‘century of humiliation’. During the early Republic era, intellectuals facing China’s national crisis turned to history to identify the causes of national weakness and humiliation located them in the Ming-Qing transition. The source intervenes to reframe the narrative to highlight continuity rather than civilizational rupture. Notably, but perhaps not very explicitly, a central purpose of the Zhejiang source’s intervention in historical interpretation and the online discourse is to defend the legitimacy of contemporary People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) borders. Indeed, the source connects historical continuity with sovereignty: “building upon the Ming dynasty’s political system, the Qing dynasty consolidated the territory of a unified multi-ethnic nation-state” and “its contributions in establishing the territorial map of modern China cannot be overlooked.” This argument is strategic: delegitimizing the Qing as a foreign ‘non-Chinese’ regime would undermine PRC territories conquered (or reconquered) during the Qing, such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, and parts of modern-day Mongolia. In emphasizing that the Qing inherited and extended Chinese civilization rather than interrupting it, the Party makes the assertion that these regions have been historically integrated into the Chinese state, making the defense of the Qing empire and its actions inseparable from contemporary political sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The source further corrects the 1644 historiography, addressing the dangers of Han-centrism and anti-Manchu sentiment. Some early Republican intellectuals framed national weakness and humiliation as a result of Manchu rule. Such an interpretation risks the failure to take accountability in evaluating historical failures of governance, and scapegoating entire ethnic communities or groups, instead of critical evaluation. In contrast, the article warns against “narrow Han-centrism” and excessive emphasis on “Manchu-Han antagonism,” which risks fragmenting its promotion of a unified multi-ethnic nation. Historical failures under the Qing should instead be attributed to governance issues, rather than ethnic illegitimacy or civilizational inferiority: “the Qing dynasty indeed had many serious drawbacks and governance failures” but seems to be somewhat subordinated to the broader argument for “civilizational resilience.” It frames the Qing as part of a continuous, multi-ethnic Chinese civilization rather than as an illegitimate dynasty. In considering the political implications of a popular historical narrative, like this one, the source may also be seeking to prevent emboldening separatist sentiment and challenge to claims on certain territories, as well as to maintain cohesion in Party ideoogy— all of which rely on historical continuity and multi-ethnic incorporation.

However, the source also invokes a subtle but significant tension. By emphasizing the need to “guard against instrumentalization of history” by “any form of political agenda or irrational emotion,” it implicitly risks raising questions among citizens about the Party’s own legitimacy in itself, and in shaping and promoting certain historical narratives. The article insists on a holistic and rigorous approach for historical confidence, challenging netizens to “transcend emotional praise or criticism of a single dynasty,” rather than blindly following popular opinions. In doing so, the source positions the Party as the ultimate arbiter of historical truth, and the ultimate guide for correcting false or emotionally charged interpretations. This framing exposes a key paradox: in asserting which historical interpretations are correct, the Party itself exercises considerable control over historiography, defining the boundaries of legitimate historical discourse rather subtly. In linking Qing legitimacy to modern PRC borders and emphasizing the continuity of a unified, multi-ethnic nation, the source turns its historiographical argument into a strategic instrument for reinforcing state sovereignty and its conception of a unified, national identity. While the article condemns the politicization and instrumentalization of history, it simultaneously demonstrates that historical narratives are never without their own perspectives and agendas.

Ultimately, the CPC Zhejiang article shows that historical discourse and debate over the Ming-Qing transition, humiliation, and identity, are connected in a bigger argument about how China defines itself. By rejecting the ‘1644 historical perspective,’ which frames the Qing as a barbaric foreign regime responsible for China’s humiliation, the Party reframes historical accountability: failures are attributed to governance, not ethnic illegitimacy, and dynastic change is presented as part of a continuous Chinese civilization rather than a rupture. In emphasizing that “building upon the Ming dynasty’s political system, the Qing dynasty consolidated the territory of a unified multi-ethnic nation-state,” the source links historiography to contemporary sovereignty, affirming PRC borders and multi-ethnic unity while preempting separatist claims. The CPC’s rejection of the ‘1644 view’ is therefore both an academic intervention and a political act, illustrating that in China, debates over the past are inseparable from questions of national identity and legitimacy.

Essay 2

In response to the renewed popularity of the “1644 historical perspective,” which attributes a civilizational rupture and China’s modern humiliation to the Manchu conquest, Chinese state media in Zhejiang province published a rebuttal framing such views as anachronistic and politically instrumentalized. While the article correctly warns against projecting modern nationalist categories onto early modern history, it simultaneously relies on the retrospective reasoning of a multi-ethnic Chinese civilization whose conceptual coherence was itself only constructed in the twentieth century. Although this piece appears to be concerned with the past, it is in fact far more revealing of the present. It offers a useful dissection of the contemporary PRC’s effort to stabilize its own historical “origin story,” along with the anxieties and narrative fractures that accompany this project.

The Zhejiang Publicity piece begins by advancing what it presents as a more “nuanced” account of the Ming–Qing transition, emphasizing that the Ming dynasty was already collapsing prior to Qing intervention, and that Manchu forces were only one factor among multiple structural crises. This caution against overemphasizing a single historical event is broadly valid. However, the analysis that follows proves considerably less nuanced than the initial framing suggests.

In rebutting the backward projection of rigid Yi (barbarian) versus Hua (Chinese) identities, the article argues that ordinary people’s identities in the seventeenth century were primarily regional, local, and dynastic. This point is historically reasonable. Yet the argument then moves quickly to claim that the Qing conquest is merely a change of regime within a resillient Chinese civilization. It then cites practices Qing inherited from previous dynaties, such as the keju (imperial examination system), written Chinese, and Confucian political norms as evidence of the above.

Here, however, the article reproduces the very fallacies it tries to criticize. The policies it cites tell us more about Qing strategies of imperial governance than about civilizational identity as such. Institutional adoption does not necessarily indicate cultural or civilizational continuity, particularly when considering the elites. For example, even after the so-called “sinofication”, the Qing court continues to centralize Manchu language and banner institutions at court. Moreover, the article conveniently omits other Qing strategies of rule, including the selective adoption of Tibetan Buddhism to consolidate authority in Mongolia and Inner Asia.

While much of the argument hinges on the idea of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu), this term itself was only coined in 1902 by Liang Qichao under the pressures of late Qing crisis. The article’s effort to validate Qing legitimacy through claims of ethnic inclusivity therefore rests on an anachronistic framework. More paradoxically, continuity is still only measured by the extent to which Qing rule conformed to Han institutional norms. This creates an interesting tension: the claim that Chinese history is “jointly written by multiple ethnic groups” depends on criteria of legitimacy that remain fundamentally Han-centered. It also relies on the contemporary classification of “56 ethnic groups,” a taxonomy that only emerged from the PRC’s nation-building project in the 1950s.

Throughout the article, terms such as “extreme,” “instrumentalized,” and “political” are repeatedly deployed to frame the “1644 historical perspective” as a deliberate distortion of history masquerading as popular sentiment.Yet what the rebuttal itself, shown as upholding “academic rationality”, shows is no less what it calls “academic politicization”, that is urgently needed by the PRC.

Within the Chinese historiographical tradition, the responsibility for recording the history of a fallen dynasty has conventionally belonged to its successor. The PRC inherits the Qing past in a far more ambivalent manner. On the one hand, the Qing is held responsible for China’s “modern humiliation,” blamed for ideological rigidity and military incapacity in the face of Western imperialism. On the other hand, Qing territorial expansion is treated as the historical foundation for contemporary claims of China’s “since ancient times” sovereignty. In this sense, the controversy surrounding the “1644 historical perspective” is less a debate over historical misunderstanding than a reflection of unresolved questions of identity in the present. The Zhejiang Publicity piece thus carries clear propagandistic significance: rewriting Qing history today has become inseparable from defining the meaning of all the history that came before it.

Multimedia Source: Empress Dowager Cixi

Essay 1

The late 1800s is critical in China’s history and a dramatic separation point as the Qing dynasty faced both internal rebellions and foreign encroachment. This eventually led to the dismantling of China’s global dominance and forced its modernization, marking the end of imperial dynasties. Completely new measures such as the abolition of the Keju were ford to be taken, and this is shown in Towards the Republic with Empress Dowager Cixi and her fellow officials debating each other. This move was not merely an educational reform but an institutional disembedding of Confucian moral authority from the structure of Qing governance. As Qu Hongji says that the exams are “the foundation of government and the focus of ethics” and asks, “What schools will replace the hearts of men?”, he reveals that the exams were not merely a testing system, but the institution that tied Confucian moral learning to state authority.

Even though Zhang Zhidong said in Exhortation to Learn “The old learning is to be the substance; the new learning is to be for application [function],” it did not work so simply as that. Confucian “substance” has long depended on the Keju system to exist as political authority, and once it was removed, it removed Confucianism from its role as the state’s unifying moral foundation. Zhang later believed they could modernize institutions without damaging Confucian foundations, but the Keju system did more than recruit officials, as it was a state recognition of virtue, and degree holders acted as imperial authority in rural society. Without it, the system through which the state recognizes virtue is removed. Confucian values might still exist, but they would no longer be politically certified. The exam system also gave educated men a clear pathway, and abolition would break the chain: studying leading to service which was tied to the dynasty. Once the guaranteed path from learning to office is gone, elite loyalty would no longer rely on institutional expectation, which would be dangerous for the entire society.

Yuan Shikai also points out that under the Boxer Protocol, examinations were already suspended in certain regions and that foreign defeat had already weakened institutional continuity. Reform was therefore no longer a matter of choice but a response to geopolitical crisis. The “substance” cannot be preserved because the institutional conditions for its preservation have already been destroyed by external pressure anyway. So Zhang’s apparent self-contradiction is not entirely his own but a decision that has already been made for them by foreign powers. Lu Xun’s short story “Kong Yiji” also shows how exam abolition, despite its destabilizing consequences, was intellectually reasonable. Kong Yiji’s desperate wish for scholarly privilege reveals examination culture’s moral bankruptcy, and it demonstrates that Confucian learning had become socially illegible, with its forms preserved but its substance evacuated already. Kong Yiji’s tragic fate suggests that the system was already producing social dysfunction as educated men clung to status markers that were emptied of content.

The story of Liu Dapeng, on the other hand, shows how Confucianism survived abolition through transformation for a while. Liu invested his entire life in the examination pathway, but he met the abolition of it and so the degree he worked so hard for had symbolic value but no more administrative power. However, Confucianism did not vanish from Liu’s life as he kept practicing moral self-cultivation and mediated disputes locally. Harrison observes that “in the absence of the state as a unifying force, Confucian values developed and changed in different ways in each of these institutions.” Liu’s moral authority was more useful in a commercial mediation way rather than in official governance, demonstrating the weakening of the gentry’s structural stake in the dynasty. As shown in the story, as time goes by, villagers mocked Liu for his old ways of respect and Confucianism, and finally, even cultural respect for Confucian practices declined.

Coming back to the video clip, Cixi proceeds to ask “So what is our basis?” after the debate. This is central as it leads to the question of if the abolition happened, what institution would then reproduce moral and political authority? Yet Cixi does not answer it, instead, as she states, “It is better to make mistakes than not act” and other pragmatic sayings, she gestures toward experimental governance and recognition of trade-offs. She does not clarify what the “new basis” is as Cixi here perhaps realizes that it is impossible to preserve basis while incorporating new functions, but proceeds anyway out of necessity. She turns to the idea of girls’ schools, as the old system produced male officials and a modern state should require broader educational institutions, like foreign states. However, this transition was also seen to be incomplete as new schools had not yet gained the authority or stability that the examination system with a centuries-old structure once possessed. Reform therefore created uncertainty, but it is fair to say that Cixi was governing under constraint, so she was neither entirely modern nor conservative. Reform appeared to be experimental shaped by external pressure and limited options. Abolishing the examinations was perhaps one of the things that led to the downfall of the Qing, however it was not the direct cause nor the only cause. The move was somewhat strategic as the system was already badly misaligned with modern warfare and administration and the curriculum did not prepare officials for industrial and military competition. However, all the moral authority, elite ambition, and recruitment dismantling led things in different directions and the alignment fractured. The certified virtue that was embedded in the system disappeared and legitimacy had to be rebuilt under far more difficult conditions.

The show portrays Cixi rather sympathetically, which shows how the early 21st century Chinese reassessed late Qing reform. Cixi was not just corrupt and incompetent, but was depicted as a leader navigating impossible constraints. She appears to be thoughtful, consulting multiple perspectives and genuinely troubled by the dilemma. This may serve as a way of looking at history with contemporary political purposes: if late Qing reformers failed not because of incompetence but because of unsolvable structural contradictions, then reform’s difficulty becomes a transhistorical constant rather than regime-specific failure. The 21st century audience could see this resonating with other leaders as well, as post-Mao, Deng and others also made many experimental policy-making decisions. The series also aired during the time when the Chinese Communist Party was navigating its own “substance vs function” tensions as well as they wished to preserve socialist political structure while also adopting capitalist economic mechanisms. The narrative overall serves early 2000s nationalism by depicting reform as necessity imposed by foreign aggression, not entirely willing Westernization. The examination abolition was seen here as a miniature of all the things late Qing was facing: mostly measures that had to be taken based on external pressure and internal dysfunction. Yet the consequences were destabilizing precisely because no clear successor institution existed to “replace the hearts of men.” The gentry lost their structural stake in the regime, local authority had no more power, Confucian learning became culturally marginal… All these consequences were unintended but comprehensible. Reform would necessarily be revolutionary, not because reformers desired revolution but because the institutions that underwent reform were so deeply embedded in social relations that transformation triggered cascading destabilization. The questions Cixi faced about balancing institutional change with moral continuity, remained unresolved in Chinese political culture more than a century later.