MCLC: tale of the dragon lady

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Lulu Chen <luciachn at gmail.com>
Subject: tale of the dragon lady
***********************************************************

Hello!

List members might find this interesting. Thank you!

Lulu Chen

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Source: Foreign Policy (06/26/12):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/26/tale_of_the_dragon_lady
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/26/tale_of_the_dragon_lady?p
a>

Tale of the Dragon Lady
TYhe long, sordid history behind China's blame-the-woman syndrome.
BY PAUL FRENCH

The press has called her China's Jackie Kennedy
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303299604577327472813686432.
html>, Lady Macbeth
<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/avarice-ambition-fell-chinas
-lady-macbeth/story-e6frg6z6-1226325268828>, and the Empress
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/neil-heywood-killer-unforgiving-e
mpress>. There's been no trial, except by the blogosphere; no real
evidence, beyond rumor and innuendo. Yet Gu Kailai, the wife of fallen
Politburo member Bo Xilai has effectively been tried, convicted, and
executed both on China's Internet and in the foreign media for the death
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/9196486/Bo-Xilais-wife-Gu-Kaila
i-arrested-for-Neil-Heywoods-murder.html> of British businessman Neil
Heywood.

It's an irresistible story: Gu Kailai, the wife of senior Communist Party
figure and high-profile Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, is said to
have arranged the murder and cremation without autopsy of the family
confidant and her rumored lover
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/12/china-s-jackie-kennedy-gu
-kailai-and-the-bo-xilai-s-scandal.html> Heywood in a Chongqing hotel in
November 2011. After Bo's former police chief, Wang Lijun, fled to the
U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, torpedoing Bo's career, Gu's involvement began
to seep out, and in April, China's official news agency, Xinhua,confirmed
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/10/us-china-politics-bo-idUSBRE8390
KT20120410> that Gu was being investigated for Heywood's murder. On June
22, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun
<http://ajw.asahi.com/article/asia/china/AJ201206220040>, citing
"Communist Party sources," claimed that Gu has confessed to murdering
Heywood.

Sadly, "dragon ladies" are an all-too-familiar trope in Chinese history: A
successful man achieves power, wealth, and the love of many before being
brought low by an excessive ambition encouraged by his wife, a beautiful
woman obsessed with money and power. There has been a consistent
demonization of women in traditional Chinese history. Blamed for the
collapse of the three earliest dynasties, women were regularly described
as tyrants and nymphomaniacs who destroy thrones and cause war. Even
today, the Communist Party prefers the narrative of a dragon lady to the
reality of a massive internal rupture in the halls of government.

We could go back a long way -- history tends to in China -- and recall
Empress Wu Zetian, who ruled between 665 and 725 A.D. The Confucian
historians who disliked her reforms portrayed her as sexually rapacious, a
devourer of young men and corrupter of Buddhist monks. The most famous
dragon lady, however, is the Dowager Empress Cixi, an outsider who rose in
the late 19th century through sexual exploits from an emperor's concubine
to the one person running -- and, many would argue, ruining -- the Qing
dynasty. Although there's no more actual evidence of Cixi's homicidal
tendencies than there is of Gu's, that hasn't stopped historical soap
operas on Chinese television from claiming that Cixi murdered the Guangxu
Emperor to preserve her legacy after her death
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-11/21/content_7226663.htm>.

Most dragon ladies are married to a man but wedded to the throne. Soong
Mei-ling, the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, China's ruler before Mao Zedong,
was allegedly politically conniving, all-corrupting, sexually promiscuous,
and self-enriching. After World War II, it became clear that the Chiang
family had pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid
intended for the war. She reputedly bedded
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/05/china.jonathanfenby> 1940
U.S. Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie as part of her plan
to see him become president so she "could rule the East and he the West"
-- though no evidence of this exists. The communist-driven historical
narrative, which formerly cast Chiang as a traitor, now views him
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/29/china-trade-deal-taiwa
n-fears>as a "misguided patriot." Today, Madame Chiang is seen as a style
icon 
<http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-last-empress-20100430-ty6x.h
tml> -- her cheongsams with thigh-high slits are still popular -- and a
consummate manipulator. Indeed, to follow the new, approved narrative of
Chiang as a misguided one is to be encouraged to believe that Madame did a
large amount of the misguiding.

Jiang Qing, or Madame Mao, was as ruthless as her husband. A former movie
star who became Mao's fourth wife (ousting wives is a trait Madame Chiang
and Madame Mao share with Gu, herself a second wife accused of ousting the
first), Jiang dictated China's cultural policy during the Cultural
Revolution, personally driving dozens if not hundreds of artists to
suicide. Imprisoned after her husband's death, Jiang defended herself by
saying, "I was the Chairman's dog. Whoever he asked me to bite, I bit."
The notion of a player behind the throne -- coming with smiles to do the
dirty work of the male leader -- plays into the dragon-lady trope in both
East and West, whether it's Fu Manchu's beautiful but murderous daughter
 Fah Lo See in the 1932 Yellow Peril B-movie The Mask of Fu Manchu, or, as
we are led tobelieve, Madame Gu ridding her husband of Heywood, an
annoying foreign irritant.

Sex sells in China, too; despite official primness, there's a public taste
for prurience. Tales of conniving and murderous mistresses are constant
tabloid fodder -- as are the poor family men led astray by nasty ladies of
the night. It's more maddening in China because of the lip service paid to
women's liberation: China had a first wave of feminism in 1949 with Mao
claiming that "women hold up half the sky" and the banning of foot binding
and concubinage, but he never eradicated China's deep-seated misogyny. Job
ads for women still stipulate that candidates should be a certain height,
with the requisite measurements and looks; workplace sexual harassment and
domestic violence are commonplace, and successful women are still treated
with suspicion.

Because of their husbands' influence, the wives of China's senior leaders
remain off limits in mainland Chinese media. Articles don't cover
President Jiang Zemin's rumored mistress, a patriotic songstress, or Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao wife's alleged involvement in the diamond market
<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/sex-buddhism-and-ballroom-danci
ng-wikileaks-reveals-beijing-underbelly/story-e6frg6so-1226078073938>.
Perhaps because of this media blackout, the celebrity-style gossip that
surrounds the powerful wives of Western world leaders -- Hillary Clinton,
Michelle Obama, and even Cherie Blair -- continues to fascinate Chinese
tabloid readers.

But Chinese women who have achieved power on their own accord invariably
have "masculine" attributes attached to them. Women, so the thinking goes,
can only be successful through their sexuality, or through their
manliness. Minister Wu Yi, who handled China's WTO accession negotiations
in the late 1990s, was pitched by both the Western
<http://in.reuters.com/article/2007/10/21/idINIndia-30084920071021> and
Chinese media as the tougher of the two sides -- China's no-nonsense,
tough-as-nails "Iron Lady" against the more feminine scarf-wearing U.S.
Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky. Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying,
one of China's most successful female diplomats, is seen as a bruiser who
berated Pyongyang over its rogue nukes, slapped down Canberra over
Australian iron ore prices, and put the Brits in their place overLondon's
criticisms of human rights during the 2008 Beijing Olympics
<http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/ceuk/eng/sghd/t451543.htm>.

When the Bo scandal broke, enemies needed to be found fast -- Bo was a
senior party member and thus could not be portrayed as a complete traitor.
A sinister manipulator had to be found, and Gu fit the historical
narrative perfectly. Ultimately, dragon ladies are sideshows, part of the
sleight of hand to deflect from the real action. Demonizing Cixi allowed
the state to avoid picking at the rot that ran through the Qing court;
focusing on Madame Chiang's legs and looted wealth distracted from the
failures of the war against Japan; the obsession with Madame Mao's power
plays misdirected the blame due her husband, the real architect of the
chaos.

The Gu Kailai soap opera distracts as well. Did she have an affair with a
suspicious foreigner? Did she amass a fortune through fear, intimidation,
and political connections? Is she a murderess? Was she ultimately the
power behind the throne in Chongqing and not her husband? Who knows -- the
gossip is deafening; the evidence scant.

What's for sure is that while too many of us have been obsessing over
whether Dragon Lady Madame Gu killed Heywood using cyanide or not, we
should be paying more attention to the Communist Party's unprecedented
internal fight. History is written by the victors, and in China's case,
that's a group of buttoned-up old men both scornful to and deathly afraid
of their women.