Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China, holds a curious place in the annals of history. As the final representative of the Manchu Dynasty, his place is secured in Chinese records as the very undramatic end to the imperial era. Pu Yi's essentially non-existent rule takes on a greater significance only because of post factum interest in the ruler as a person. Pu Yi is "The Last Emperor," the final imperial occupant of the famed Forbidden City, a man whose luxurious lifestyle as a child was replaced by the grey world of the gardener in Mao's Red China.
During the mid 1980s, Bernardo Bertolucci, an Italian film director of international repute and admittedly leftist leanings, sought - and won - permission from the Chinese Communist government to shoot a motion picture about Pu Yi inside China, indeed, inside the Forbidden City. With funding from Columbia Pictures, a major American studio, this was to be one of the first Western-Communist Chinese joint ventures in filmmaking: the Chinese government would invest in the production, supplying locations, personnel, living quarters and other support as needed - in return for a share in the motion picture's estimated profits and partial control over the movie's contents. In terms of business arrangements, there was nothing unusual in this joint venture; since the "re-opening" of mainland China by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, followed by official diplomatic recognition of the Communist government by the Carter administration in the late 1970s, American companies had entered into a number of joint venture arrangements with Red China. China, for its part, was in the midst of a new version of "socialist economic strategy" under the guidance of Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping. Since his rise to preeminence in 1980, his policy of "Four Modernizations" encouraged private enterprise, business with the economically stronger nations of the West eagerly welcomed. Indeed, one of the firs...