Mass media reviewers have been similarly distrustful because of the book's overwhelmingly positive tone. He implied that Chang's book was neither very scholarly nor very careful in its use of sources. But he cautioned that the book assessed so positively nearly everything that Cixi did that the sources may not have been objectively assessed. John Delury, assistant professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in South Korea, also had praise for Chang's use of new Chinese-language sources. He had high praise for Chang's extensive use of Chinese-language sources, both primary and modern, which have rarely been used in English-language biographers of Cixi.

China expert Orville Schell called Chang's biography 'absorbing' although sometimes bordering on hagiography. The New York Times reported that a number of historians were wary of Chang's conclusions, however, because the book was so laudatory of Cixi. Katie Baker wrote in The Daily Beast, that the work shows that 'the past hundred years have been most unfair to Cixi' and that 'the political forces that have dominated China since soon after her death have also deliberately reviled her or blacked out her accomplishments… in terms of groundbreaking achievements, political sincerity and personal courage, Empress Dowager Cixi set a standard that has barely been matched.' The work has been translated into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish. Specialists, however, were sometimes less favorable, arguing that Chang had not read recent work in the field or made critical use of Chinese language sources. Te-Ping Chen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, found the book 'packed with details that bring to life its central character'. Newspaper reviews were positive in their assessment. Although Cixi is often accused of reactionary conservatism (especially for her treatment of the Guangxu Emperor during and after the Hundred Days' Reform), Chang concludes that Cixi 'brought medieval China into the modern age.' Chang portrays her as intelligent, open-minded, and a proto-feminist limited by a xenophobic and deeply conservative imperial bureaucracy. Chang argues that Cixi has been 'deemed either tyrannical and vicious, or hopelessly incompetent-or both', and that this view is both simplistic and inaccurate. Chang presents a sympathetic portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who unofficially controlled the Manchu Qing Dynasty in China for 47 years, from 1861 to her death in 1908. Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China is a 2013 biography written by Jung Chang, published by Alfred A.

Empress cixi book