t major companies to enter Red China was the soft drink giant Coca-Cola - and Columbia Pictures, at the time Bertolucci first broached the idea of making a film in China, was owned by the Coca-Cola conglomerate.
Still, one must ask, why would the Communist government allow its first American motion picture venture - and in dealing with Columbia it was known that this would be a widely-seen film - why would they allow the subject matter to be Pu Yi, the last emperor? The answer lies partially in the filmmaker, the Red Chinese government and the subject himself.
Bernardo Bertolucci, noted above, admits to a leftist orientation that has included open support for the Italian Communist Party in such films as 1900 and The Spider Stratagem; in conjunction with that sympathy, his anti-aristocracy perspective is equally established. Consequently, although the subject of his film, to be entitled The Last Emperor, would be Pu Yi, Party officials could feel reasonably assured that his treatment of the subject would not be a nostalgic look at past imperial glories.
The Chinese government itself, meanwhile, was in the midst of an important transition - and, despite the emphasis upon economics, the Communist leadership was also changing the ideology of the Party as well. Mao Tse-Tung had dominated the Red Chinese government until his death in the 1970s; even after his death, the "Cult of Mao" had left its legacy, a personality-dominated approach to government that was highly reflective of the unreasoned whimsy of an old man with unlimited powers - and his manipulative wife, Chiang Ching. The infamous "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s had been the worst manifestation of Mao's failure to grasp the difference between progressive revolution and disruption; many of the leaders of China, starting with Deng himself, had been knocked from power by the Cultural Revolution, imprisoned, degraded. That they bounced back was a tribute to the...