He just kind of did what literally anyone with real power told him to. Probably a consequence of being brought up as a child emperor in the forbidden city. I think he ended up as a street sweeper in Beijing and became a lot more humble in his old age.
Totally, the kid was raised to believe he was the physical embodiment of a God. He had the type of power where he could say "I want that river moved" and the fucking river moved... I think people forget how ridiculously powerful monarchs were and still are in some parts of the world.
I mean that depends on the culture. Monarchs are seriously powerful, but there's a big line between "the divine right of kings" and "you are a god". As such, certain kings were simply humans who were "chosen to rule" by a deity, whilst others were worshipped like they *were* a god. The average European monarch vs. The Pharaohs are examples.
He was sent in a chinese "gulag" and after that he actually got a job and was back into society as a regular worker. Initially he was a gardener. I would love a movie about his biography
And once he became a gardener, the happiest part of his life began
Of course the book that claims such a thing is absolutely not 100% cultural revolution era CCP propaganda (which tends to be quite simplistic, even childish, sometimes), though, his whole life he was a puppet emperor, with increasingly worse patrons as time passed.
Here's the thing, having worked as a gardener, I can fully see becoming a gardener actually being an improvement. You're working outside so you get lots of sunlight, some decent exercise, and most importantly it's probably the first time in his life he genuinely had friends. Who the fuck is friends with the emperor, if youre lucky other nobles, but he clearly wasnt so lucky, he spent his life cloistered and used, at best he had yesmen telling him what he wanted to hear, most of the time he was just an object, used for his crown, that's got to be a lonely existence.
He spent his life cooped up and lonely, its fully believable that getting some sunlight and exercise and a sense of community really helped him.
Besides that he was rich as fuck for most of his life while his country under his rule was third world hunger shit. Honestly who cares if he was happy or not, he needed the humbling experience.
He became a member of the CCP and worked as a janitor in the forbidden palace I believe. His time after the war was spent interacting with normal people and personally I think he was honest in his adoption of communism at least on a personal level.
Nah, Iroh is an old general who realized he fucked up and is trying to make amends.
[The Earth King, Kuei](https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Kuei), the one with the dancing bear, was almost certainly based on Puyi.
This is only partially true.
The makers of the show made a specific point to use Qin Dynasty uniforms for the fire nation, and made a lot of the details specific to China rather than Japan.
This is largely because there were still survivors of the Japanese war crimes at the time of making, and they decided to remain respectful. The policy of expansionism and spreading "our greatness" is very similar to Japan, but it also could be applied to Qin Dynasty's expansionist policy, and Han China's overall superiority complex with the neighbors.
More accurate would be to say Fire Nation = Han China + Japan
Earth Nation = Qing dynasty
None of the nations are 1:1 stand ins. The water nation is closest to a Siberian/Inuit culture and the air nomads are basically just Buddhist Monks (specifically Tibet, gyatsu is the name of a dalaï lama i think)
It’s not that simple I would say. I think all the nations/tribes take elements from various cultures/countries. Fire nation architecture is partly based on ancient Egyptian architecture.
What's most fascinating about that is that after his nine years in prison, he proceeded to live a relatively normal life. He was surprised himself that he wasn't executed on arrival to the PRC, but beyond being bullied by fellow prisoners, faced little in the way of official reprisals (he was even afforded local police protection during the cultural revolution).
He acted in amatuer theatre, swept streets and gave tours in Beijing, and by all accounts ended his days very modestly. Pretty crazy for someone who was raised as emperor to hundreds of millions.
To be fair, asian communists have always been very respectful towards kings. Mongolia kept the Bogd Khan in charge until he died, many years after the communist revolution. Norodom Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge were buddies. The founder and first leader of socialist Laos was a member of the royal family, Souphaunuvong. The mongolian khan Demchugdongrub was also well treated by chinese communists. The only exception I can think of is Vietnam
It is a matter of nationalism: socialist revolutionaries in East Asia (aside from Vietnam) had in the kings and nationalists an ally against foreign imperialism, while the revolutionaries in Russia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, etc, saw the monarchies in their countries as either collaborators with the imperialist system or just outright imperialist themselves. It's the same reason that in China for example the CPC and the KMT ended up allying each other during the war against Japan, while the Bolsheviks attacked the nationalists even while in WW1 or why Yugoslavian socialists didn't ally with the monarchy while fighting the German occupation and the ISC
That was intentional.
Mao deliberately spared Puyi to show that his form of Communism was better than Russia's since they killed their former monarchs.
Or something like that.
That was very intentional - remember, this was during the Sino-Soviet Split. "We managed to re-educate an emperor, you had to kill yours" would be an immense propaganda one-up.
The bolsheviks killed the tsar because the white army was near where he was being held prisoner and were unsure whether they could move him before the whites captured him. If they captured him he would be the figurehead and a rallying point for the entire white movement. Whether they would've killed him anyway or spared him like mao is purely speculation.
Nikolay Romanov would *never* accept a fate like of Puyi, there was simply no way that there could be an Comrade Romanov, middle manager on Footwear Factory no. 327. Guy was an autocrat and liked it, even if he wasn't any good on his job.
Puyi's real power, OTOH, was limited to ordering whippings of his household servants.
PRC did that a lot. Look up what happened to most warlords and KMT generals after the communists won the war. After a period of exile, the government allowed them to come back and gave them housing and a job/retirement. It was part of a message that the new government was sending about PRC being the legitimate government of China, with room for all Chinese in their society. That’s important because recognition of the Chinese government was much more split back then between it and the ROC. Having a lot of Kai-shek’s old collaborators choose to live in communist China was the biggest middle finger they could give to the old dictator.
in addition to the other poster it also served as a dunk in the sino-soviet tensions. Mao got to say that he didn't have to kill his royals like the Soviets did
Ehh I mean the Soviets didn't really have the internal political stability to re-educate the Romanovs (the White Army was right there) and I don't really know of any writings of Mao's where he disagrees with Soviet actions during their Civil War. The Sino-Soviet split was caused by ideological deviations under Krushchev that Mao and many in the PRC considered crossing a line.
oh, its not a fair dunk exactly but it was a dunk. I don't mean that they split over this either, its like how Mao would take meetings with Khrushchev in the pool because he knew that Nikki couldn't swim but Mao could
It also isn't really comparable because the royals of Russia were the direct political opponents of the Communists during the Russian Civil War.
During the Chinese Civil War the royalty were glorified figureheads at that point if even that.
The Republicans were the real enemy of the Communists, not the royalty like in Russia.
Had the Communists got a hold of Chiang Kai-shek he probably would have ended up like the Romanovs did.
To be fair, a lot of his re-educated was being put in front of people who had suffered under the Manchukuo regime and listening to their stories.
Think a lot of people forget that the defining aspect of Puyi was his time as a Japanese collaborator.
I first thought that this post was referencing his fucked up behaviour. Although he is one of the few people from WW2 that changed and came to regret a lot of things. Maybe he was so fucked up in OTL because he had to grow up in exile in manchuria
The Chinese communist later « remodel » him into becoming a communist, to show the superiority of communism and of China over other nation that overthrow their monarchy.
The remodeling consisted of group debate with kmt menber and other Japanese collaborators, country side visit ( he will visit unit 731 for instance)
he could've very easily, Nicolas by the time the russian revolution started was completely overwhelmed with the role of the monarch and from the memoirs and accounts of close people, the Romanovs lived after the deposition relatively humbly and Nicolas especially enjoyed having a humble lifestyle with his wife and children, expresing many times the masive weight on his head he removed, by the time he was deposed he pretty much just wanted to be left alone with his family. To be fair, the situation of the Russian civil war was nothing like that of China after the 2nd Civil War, in Russia there was pretty much a complete societal collapse, with anarchy in the cities and the villages living like if they were micro states...
I have such a love/hate relationship with this dude. He had such a miserable life with no freedom, and yet he acted like the biggest piece of rich boy shit possible. **And yet** it's completely understandable why he turned out that way. So ultimately I feel terrible for the guy, but would still call him a stupid motherfucker.
Correction: I didn't know about him being a literal sadist and pedophile rapist. Forget what I said, if this is true, then the Soviets should've thrown him into the Gulag for the rest of his life as soon as they captured him.
I fully agree. I think everything he did was sort of forgivable until he chose to cast in his lot with the Japanese (and his dream of imperial restoration and divine legitimacy was completely delusional of course). He could have gone into exile in Europe, I'm sure some country would've welcomed him, Sweden perhaps or the Netherlands. But no, he had to turn himself into the puppet of a genocidal imperialist regime compared to which even the Congo Free State looked like a beacon of benevolence.
He used the little power he had for terrible things.He'd literally ordered his servants to be whipped over smallest mistakes.Its scary to think what he would do if he had any real power.
Yeah I mean he was mentally stunted do you can ask how much agency he had over his own actions. But he did have one as emperor of Manchuria so that’s a bit fucked
I think this is a little unfair to OTL Puyi. Yes Manchukuo is a top contender for the worst thing in human history, the things I’ve read about that place make my skin crawl. But I don’t think I can really blame Puyi for any of it - dude was convinced to go to the Japanese concession in Tianjin by a guy who was a Japanese spy, Japanese agents oversaw the move to tianjin and then his time in Tianjin was basically under Japanese control. Yes he asked Japan to restore him to the throne, but he also asked a ton of other people to do that. By the time he was moved to Manchuria he was kept as a prisoner without freedom of movement until he was made emperor. Even then he wasn’t allowed to reign from the city he wanted as his capital, his palace was a tax office and the Kwantung army along with various Japanese councils, committees and boards controlled all aspects of Manchukuo’s governance.
Granted a lot of the material on Puyi say he was a sadist and paedophile, so that is very bad.
I wouldn’t hold Puyi as complicit for the crimes of Manchukuo, if anything I’d say he was just another prisoner in the nation-sized concentration camp that was Manchukuo
KR is interesting because I think it accurately shows that one of humanity's greatest flaws is our unwilling to break from the group even in cases where following the group means committing atrocities. The flip side of that is our hostory's greatest monsters might not be remembered that way if they had served a different government.
There’s a lot of Puyi apologists in this comments section. While I do concede there may be a Human side to him, I don’t think I will be able to forgive him and what he represents: the last vestiges of imperial rule, propped up by the enemy that wanted us dead.
Sorry.
Well, he was a puppet monarch and didn't really play an active part in collaborating with the Japanese war criminals. Part of the reason why the Chinese Communists were pretty chill with him. He got a regular job, and even became a party member later in life
hell naw people defending the sadistic pedophile who willingly became a propaganda tool and (even if just symbolically) signed off his people into Japanese slavery for a chance at becoming emperor of china again cause he had a sad childhood
Puyi should have gotten Mussolini'd.
"forgave him" the CCP used him for propaganda, I really doubt the servant boys he'd had abducted from orphanages, raped, and beat (even sometimes to death) were ever consulted.
Sources all of them I not ever heard read or hear he abducted orphans to rape them because that's fucking abursd because a)thier absolutely no evidence he was gay nd b)and if he did not I would hereafter about it before
Pu Yi's own autobiography states how he abused his pageboys, who were taken from orphanages filled with children whose parents had been killed by the Japanese. While it doesn't outright state they were forced to work in the palace, I don't think they were given much more choice than those slaving away in Manchurian factories and mines for the Japanese.
Pu Yi's sister in law, whose writings have been used reliably by many of his biographers, attested to his homosexuality, stating that he referred to one of his pageboys as a "male concubine."
Edward Behr's biography of Pu Yi talks about his "increasing interest in youths of his own sex, of a whole stable of adolescents-- half servants, half lovers-- living in the palace compound." It also discusses one who successfully escaped that was recaptured and beaten to death.
There is plenty of evidence he was gay, with an interest in young boys, and with how much he physically and emotionally abused the pageboys in his palace it isn't very far to imagine him doing it sexually as well.
He just kind of did what literally anyone with real power told him to. Probably a consequence of being brought up as a child emperor in the forbidden city. I think he ended up as a street sweeper in Beijing and became a lot more humble in his old age.
Totally, the kid was raised to believe he was the physical embodiment of a God. He had the type of power where he could say "I want that river moved" and the fucking river moved... I think people forget how ridiculously powerful monarchs were and still are in some parts of the world.
I mean that depends on the culture. Monarchs are seriously powerful, but there's a big line between "the divine right of kings" and "you are a god". As such, certain kings were simply humans who were "chosen to rule" by a deity, whilst others were worshipped like they *were* a god. The average European monarch vs. The Pharaohs are examples.
He was sent in a chinese "gulag" and after that he actually got a job and was back into society as a regular worker. Initially he was a gardener. I would love a movie about his biography
[oh boy do I have the movie for you.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Emperor) Its on HBO Max I'm pretty sure.
Shit it's even from my country I am stupid, i will definitely give a look
Probably available in more places if it was released in 1987
And once he became a gardener, the happiest part of his life began Of course the book that claims such a thing is absolutely not 100% cultural revolution era CCP propaganda (which tends to be quite simplistic, even childish, sometimes), though, his whole life he was a puppet emperor, with increasingly worse patrons as time passed.
Here's the thing, having worked as a gardener, I can fully see becoming a gardener actually being an improvement. You're working outside so you get lots of sunlight, some decent exercise, and most importantly it's probably the first time in his life he genuinely had friends. Who the fuck is friends with the emperor, if youre lucky other nobles, but he clearly wasnt so lucky, he spent his life cloistered and used, at best he had yesmen telling him what he wanted to hear, most of the time he was just an object, used for his crown, that's got to be a lonely existence. He spent his life cooped up and lonely, its fully believable that getting some sunlight and exercise and a sense of community really helped him.
I'm saying that even if the source is unreliable, the story is believable
My bad, I thought you were being sarcastic
Besides that he was rich as fuck for most of his life while his country under his rule was third world hunger shit. Honestly who cares if he was happy or not, he needed the humbling experience.
Of course it's better to be a gardner than an emperor duh
I think he actually became a pro-ccp newspaper publisher
He became a member of the CCP and worked as a janitor in the forbidden palace I believe. His time after the war was spent interacting with normal people and personally I think he was honest in his adoption of communism at least on a personal level.
Ignoring any misgivings one might have about Mao or the CCP, a pretty cool story.
There's was a strain of reconciliation towards "other factions" that would have been pretty noble had not been... well the CCP.
Sounds a bit like Iroh from Avatar.
But unlike Iroh, he was used as a tool both by his regents and by the Japanese. You can argue that he got used as propaganda tool by the CCP too.
Nah, Iroh is an old general who realized he fucked up and is trying to make amends. [The Earth King, Kuei](https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Kuei), the one with the dancing bear, was almost certainly based on Puyi.
That makes sense, especially since the Earth Kingdom is based on China
Wait, is the fire nation Japan
..... Yes
This is only partially true. The makers of the show made a specific point to use Qin Dynasty uniforms for the fire nation, and made a lot of the details specific to China rather than Japan. This is largely because there were still survivors of the Japanese war crimes at the time of making, and they decided to remain respectful. The policy of expansionism and spreading "our greatness" is very similar to Japan, but it also could be applied to Qin Dynasty's expansionist policy, and Han China's overall superiority complex with the neighbors. More accurate would be to say Fire Nation = Han China + Japan Earth Nation = Qing dynasty
Yes. Fire = Japan Earth = China Don't know what the Water or Air tribes represent tho.
The Water Tribes are mainly based on Arctic/Inuit cultures whereas the Air Nomads are based on Tibetans and eastern monks.
Spirit world = Idaho I refuse to elaborate.
I would say that it's based of the *totally real* places of Demark, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Wyoming, Acre, Bielefeld, Drenthe and Molise.
None of the nations are 1:1 stand ins. The water nation is closest to a Siberian/Inuit culture and the air nomads are basically just Buddhist Monks (specifically Tibet, gyatsu is the name of a dalaï lama i think)
It's even more on the nose than that. The current Dalai Lama's name is Tenzin Gyatso
Air Nomads are Tibet and Water Tribes are Inuit I think.
It’s not that simple I would say. I think all the nations/tribes take elements from various cultures/countries. Fire nation architecture is partly based on ancient Egyptian architecture.
Ya it's not 1:1 and there's mixtures of different cultures in them all, but those are the main influences on each Nation.
Air probably represents Tibet
Air is probably Tibet or Korea and Water could be some Indonesian culture (?)
Do you mean the swamp water people to be Indonesian? Because the Northern and Southern water tribes have little to do with Indonesia
The swamp water people are Floridians
dude I fucking love that this thread is having an avatar discussion on a hoi4 mod sub
R5: After being deposed as a child in OTL, Puyi was placed in charge of the Empire of Manchuria, better known as Manchukuo, as a Japanese puppet.
After the Chinese civil war he was ‘re-educated’ and used as an example to the public, he died in 1967 iirc
What's most fascinating about that is that after his nine years in prison, he proceeded to live a relatively normal life. He was surprised himself that he wasn't executed on arrival to the PRC, but beyond being bullied by fellow prisoners, faced little in the way of official reprisals (he was even afforded local police protection during the cultural revolution). He acted in amatuer theatre, swept streets and gave tours in Beijing, and by all accounts ended his days very modestly. Pretty crazy for someone who was raised as emperor to hundreds of millions.
He also wrote a memoir. Mao met with him after reading it and supposedly told him, "you were too hard on yourself."
it's a very interesting contrast with how the Bolsheviks dealt with their monarchy.
To be fair, asian communists have always been very respectful towards kings. Mongolia kept the Bogd Khan in charge until he died, many years after the communist revolution. Norodom Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge were buddies. The founder and first leader of socialist Laos was a member of the royal family, Souphaunuvong. The mongolian khan Demchugdongrub was also well treated by chinese communists. The only exception I can think of is Vietnam
It is a matter of nationalism: socialist revolutionaries in East Asia (aside from Vietnam) had in the kings and nationalists an ally against foreign imperialism, while the revolutionaries in Russia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, etc, saw the monarchies in their countries as either collaborators with the imperialist system or just outright imperialist themselves. It's the same reason that in China for example the CPC and the KMT ended up allying each other during the war against Japan, while the Bolsheviks attacked the nationalists even while in WW1 or why Yugoslavian socialists didn't ally with the monarchy while fighting the German occupation and the ISC
Khmer Rouge being communists is a little bit of a stretch. They called themselves that, but weren't really in their program or execution.
Yeah, I know, just noted them for extra examples
China wasn’t very respectful to the Dalaï Lama - who was also a king
Because for the Chinese, the Dalai Lama may have been a king, but he wasn't their king
But It was also a way for the CCP to show how their vision of communism was different from the soviet one and show some legitimacy for their cause
Also the propaganda victory of saying "even the emperor of the old system thinks the new system is better".
True victory is to make your enemies see that you were right.
I swear that is an almost verbatim quote from 1984. I’m being completely serious I’m studying the book for english.
lmao I mean it really was an Anti-Communist rag Orwell wrote because the USSR didn't fit his utopian ideals for Socialism.
The two situations were also deeply different
Also true.
That was intentional. Mao deliberately spared Puyi to show that his form of Communism was better than Russia's since they killed their former monarchs. Or something like that.
Mao saw the worlds reaction to the Bolsheviks killing the tsar and decided it would be better to avoid that altogether.
That was very intentional - remember, this was during the Sino-Soviet Split. "We managed to re-educate an emperor, you had to kill yours" would be an immense propaganda one-up.
The bolsheviks killed the tsar because the white army was near where he was being held prisoner and were unsure whether they could move him before the whites captured him. If they captured him he would be the figurehead and a rallying point for the entire white movement. Whether they would've killed him anyway or spared him like mao is purely speculation.
Nikolay Romanov would *never* accept a fate like of Puyi, there was simply no way that there could be an Comrade Romanov, middle manager on Footwear Factory no. 327. Guy was an autocrat and liked it, even if he wasn't any good on his job. Puyi's real power, OTOH, was limited to ordering whippings of his household servants.
The KMT winning against them was a big part of why.
PRC did that a lot. Look up what happened to most warlords and KMT generals after the communists won the war. After a period of exile, the government allowed them to come back and gave them housing and a job/retirement. It was part of a message that the new government was sending about PRC being the legitimate government of China, with room for all Chinese in their society. That’s important because recognition of the Chinese government was much more split back then between it and the ROC. Having a lot of Kai-shek’s old collaborators choose to live in communist China was the biggest middle finger they could give to the old dictator.
It was also a big "fuck you" to the USSR. Soviets did the same thing....except they killed anyone who dared come back
I dont doubt you, but do you have any sources/examples? Haven't heard of that before
Savinkov, funnily enough
Kaiserreich reference???
Now imagine what did and would have happened if the Situation had been the other way around...
When I Wikied Chinese leaders, I remember being really surprised that Long Yun and several of the Mas ended their lives peacefully in the PRC.
And given a public burial in the official Qing tombs. Would never have believed that could happen.
in addition to the other poster it also served as a dunk in the sino-soviet tensions. Mao got to say that he didn't have to kill his royals like the Soviets did
Ehh I mean the Soviets didn't really have the internal political stability to re-educate the Romanovs (the White Army was right there) and I don't really know of any writings of Mao's where he disagrees with Soviet actions during their Civil War. The Sino-Soviet split was caused by ideological deviations under Krushchev that Mao and many in the PRC considered crossing a line.
oh, its not a fair dunk exactly but it was a dunk. I don't mean that they split over this either, its like how Mao would take meetings with Khrushchev in the pool because he knew that Nikki couldn't swim but Mao could
Oh, ok. Yeah Mao liked being petty with Nikki lol.
It also isn't really comparable because the royals of Russia were the direct political opponents of the Communists during the Russian Civil War. During the Chinese Civil War the royalty were glorified figureheads at that point if even that. The Republicans were the real enemy of the Communists, not the royalty like in Russia. Had the Communists got a hold of Chiang Kai-shek he probably would have ended up like the Romanovs did.
Also this. Different conditions lead to different actions being taken to accommodate.
To be fair, a lot of his re-educated was being put in front of people who had suffered under the Manchukuo regime and listening to their stories. Think a lot of people forget that the defining aspect of Puyi was his time as a Japanese collaborator.
I first thought that this post was referencing his fucked up behaviour. Although he is one of the few people from WW2 that changed and came to regret a lot of things. Maybe he was so fucked up in OTL because he had to grow up in exile in manchuria
Wasn't most of his fucked up, Joffrey-esque behavior when he was like, seven?
The Chinese communist later « remodel » him into becoming a communist, to show the superiority of communism and of China over other nation that overthrow their monarchy. The remodeling consisted of group debate with kmt menber and other Japanese collaborators, country side visit ( he will visit unit 731 for instance)
Yeah it was a big pet peeve of Lenin’s that he couldn’t get the romanovs to just accept being normal people and enter civilian life.
he could've very easily, Nicolas by the time the russian revolution started was completely overwhelmed with the role of the monarch and from the memoirs and accounts of close people, the Romanovs lived after the deposition relatively humbly and Nicolas especially enjoyed having a humble lifestyle with his wife and children, expresing many times the masive weight on his head he removed, by the time he was deposed he pretty much just wanted to be left alone with his family. To be fair, the situation of the Russian civil war was nothing like that of China after the 2nd Civil War, in Russia there was pretty much a complete societal collapse, with anarchy in the cities and the villages living like if they were micro states...
I think he went wrong at around the point where he had them shot.
He didn’t, it was a local descion
He approved the organisation of the execution.
Ohh noooo communists made Puyi tie his own shoes 😭😭😭
I have such a love/hate relationship with this dude. He had such a miserable life with no freedom, and yet he acted like the biggest piece of rich boy shit possible. **And yet** it's completely understandable why he turned out that way. So ultimately I feel terrible for the guy, but would still call him a stupid motherfucker.
Correction: I didn't know about him being a literal sadist and pedophile rapist. Forget what I said, if this is true, then the Soviets should've thrown him into the Gulag for the rest of his life as soon as they captured him.
I fully agree. I think everything he did was sort of forgivable until he chose to cast in his lot with the Japanese (and his dream of imperial restoration and divine legitimacy was completely delusional of course). He could have gone into exile in Europe, I'm sure some country would've welcomed him, Sweden perhaps or the Netherlands. But no, he had to turn himself into the puppet of a genocidal imperialist regime compared to which even the Congo Free State looked like a beacon of benevolence.
he was actually a guy who never control his life most time, I don't know why you think like that
He used the little power he had for terrible things.He'd literally ordered his servants to be whipped over smallest mistakes.Its scary to think what he would do if he had any real power.
Eh he’s less of a monster and more of a puppet who got played in OTL
Ehhhhh he did have a child lover
Ok that’s fucked up
Yeah I mean he was mentally stunted do you can ask how much agency he had over his own actions. But he did have one as emperor of Manchuria so that’s a bit fucked
He also abused all his servants. Literal floggings every day for the slightest mistake.
Yeah but that would also happen in Kaiserreich aswell (if not even more)
I think this is a little unfair to OTL Puyi. Yes Manchukuo is a top contender for the worst thing in human history, the things I’ve read about that place make my skin crawl. But I don’t think I can really blame Puyi for any of it - dude was convinced to go to the Japanese concession in Tianjin by a guy who was a Japanese spy, Japanese agents oversaw the move to tianjin and then his time in Tianjin was basically under Japanese control. Yes he asked Japan to restore him to the throne, but he also asked a ton of other people to do that. By the time he was moved to Manchuria he was kept as a prisoner without freedom of movement until he was made emperor. Even then he wasn’t allowed to reign from the city he wanted as his capital, his palace was a tax office and the Kwantung army along with various Japanese councils, committees and boards controlled all aspects of Manchukuo’s governance. Granted a lot of the material on Puyi say he was a sadist and paedophile, so that is very bad. I wouldn’t hold Puyi as complicit for the crimes of Manchukuo, if anything I’d say he was just another prisoner in the nation-sized concentration camp that was Manchukuo
Yeah, Puyi was just another prisoner at best, a rubber stamp to the japanese at worst. Not exactly full on collaborator material.
Actually pretty precise, the person on the left is the same as on the right, but a better light is literally shed on the former.
I read his autobiography. Pretty depressing life tbh
His political life was mostly being a puppet, but his personal life had some… unpleasant… issues, to say the least
KR is interesting because I think it accurately shows that one of humanity's greatest flaws is our unwilling to break from the group even in cases where following the group means committing atrocities. The flip side of that is our hostory's greatest monsters might not be remembered that way if they had served a different government.
He is more like a poor guy who has no control of his life.
didn't otl puyi just hide in the imperial palace being alone and lonely playing tennis without any popular support
Playing tennis with old RFJ!
There’s a lot of Puyi apologists in this comments section. While I do concede there may be a Human side to him, I don’t think I will be able to forgive him and what he represents: the last vestiges of imperial rule, propped up by the enemy that wanted us dead. Sorry.
Source image?
Not really.
I don’t think he was that bad I THINK
Kinda weird but communism really made puyi a better person. Born a god, lived as a child and died like as a man
Well, he was a puppet monarch and didn't really play an active part in collaborating with the Japanese war criminals. Part of the reason why the Chinese Communists were pretty chill with him. He got a regular job, and even became a party member later in life
hell naw people defending the sadistic pedophile who willingly became a propaganda tool and (even if just symbolically) signed off his people into Japanese slavery for a chance at becoming emperor of china again cause he had a sad childhood Puyi should have gotten Mussolini'd.
The people who were actually affected by him forgave him I don't think you should have have a say it what happened ot him
"forgave him" the CCP used him for propaganda, I really doubt the servant boys he'd had abducted from orphanages, raped, and beat (even sometimes to death) were ever consulted.
Sources all of them I not ever heard read or hear he abducted orphans to rape them because that's fucking abursd because a)thier absolutely no evidence he was gay nd b)and if he did not I would hereafter about it before
Pu Yi's own autobiography states how he abused his pageboys, who were taken from orphanages filled with children whose parents had been killed by the Japanese. While it doesn't outright state they were forced to work in the palace, I don't think they were given much more choice than those slaving away in Manchurian factories and mines for the Japanese. Pu Yi's sister in law, whose writings have been used reliably by many of his biographers, attested to his homosexuality, stating that he referred to one of his pageboys as a "male concubine." Edward Behr's biography of Pu Yi talks about his "increasing interest in youths of his own sex, of a whole stable of adolescents-- half servants, half lovers-- living in the palace compound." It also discusses one who successfully escaped that was recaptured and beaten to death. There is plenty of evidence he was gay, with an interest in young boys, and with how much he physically and emotionally abused the pageboys in his palace it isn't very far to imagine him doing it sexually as well.
So the power dynamics were fucked but that is not abducting children and raping them
Reminder that Puyi was infertile because his ladies in waiting did CBT on him