Poison and power in Beijing By Mure Dickie
Published: November 7 2008 19:17 | Last updated: November 7 2008 19:17
For a long time it looked as if the murderers of ChinaÂ’s second-to-last emperor were going to get away with it.
Suspicions had always surrounded the death in agony of the reformist Guangxu Emperor in November 1908, not least because it came just a day before the passing of his aunt and jailor, the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi. But historians of ChinaÂ’s 1644-1911 Qing dynasty had pored over his medical records and concluded the 36-year-old monarch, who had spent a decade under palace arrest, probably died of natural causes.
Now, however, in a piece of detective work worthy of the stars of the hit US forensic science series, CSI, investigators probing the imperial remains have established that Guangxu was killed by arsenic poisoning.
The findings were released this week by a team including Beijing police scientists and experts from the China Institute of Atomic Energy. Now the way is open for what state media say could be “further research” into the identity of the killers, a prospect that no doubt has the prime suspects – led by Cixi herself – trembling in their tombs.
News of the poisoning has reawoken discussion of what might have happened if Guangxu had survived. Some historians suggest he might have created a constitutional monarchy similar to that of neighbouring Japan and thus averted the political turmoil and civil war that cost China so dearly in the 20th century.
Joseph Esherick, professor of history at the University of California at San Diego, makes a more philosophical point. “One obvious message here is the highly personal nature of power in the Chinese political system – something which applied at the end of the dynasty and continues perhaps up to the present,” he says.
Certainly, Guangxu was not the last Chinese head of state to find himself in personal peril from rivals in the leadership. Liu Shaoqi, state chairman, died in jail in 1969 after being brutally treated and denied medical care by Communist party comrades loyal to Mao Zedong. Things have, however, improved since then: Zhao Ziyang, the late party chief, was merely kept under house arrest after he was deposed in 1989.
Public reaction to news of GuangxuÂ’s murder has been restrained, perhaps because modern Chinese have more pressing poisonings to worry about. Confidence in the national food chain has been shaken by a series of scandals, including the contamination of milk products this year that has killed four infants and sickened tens of thousands.
Anger at the milk scandal – initially hushed up to prevent it spoiling the Beijing Olympics – has been fuelled by reports that senior officials have access to a secret food supply of organic produce free of the chemicals that contaminate much fare served up to the masses.
TodayÂ’s Chinese leaders may not have to worry about having arsenic slipped into their food, but they still feel the need to be careful about what they eat.
The writer is an FT Beijing correspondent
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
