The Last Manchu

by Henry Pu Yi

  What surprised me the most was that the old and desolate atmosphere that had pervaded the palace by the time I had left it was now gone. It had been painted and even the door and window curtains, the draperies on the beds, the seat covers and tablecloths were new. Upon inquiry I found that all these had been made in a special weaving establishment near the palace to reproduce the original fabrics.

  There were really not many jade pieces, porcelains, calligraphy, paintings and other ancient cultural relics left, but I did find some things that the Museum had purchased as well as others that had been contributed by private collectors. For instance, there was a famous painting of a river scene which Pu Chieh and I had taken and sold which had been repurchased. In the Imperial Garden I smelled the fragrance emitted by the old cypress trees and it brought back to me memories of my youth.

  In March, 1960, I was assigned to work at the Peking Botanical Garden which was under the direction of the Chinese Scientific Botanical Research Center. I worked a half day and studied a half day. This was essentially a testing period for me during which my reformation and remolding could be observed by the authorities and was preparatory to my eventual assignment as a professional worker for the government. Under the direction of technicians I was taught in the hothouse how to plant seeds, how to care for the plants, how to transplant, and so on. When I was not on the job at the hothouse I either studied or worked on my autobiography. The people with whom I worked and lived at the Botanical Garden were friendly and kind from the top to the bottom.

  One day, after I returned from a stroll outside, I discovered that my watch was missing. I couldn’t help but feel upset. Also I believed that since I had gone for such a long walk I would never be able to find it again and that I might just as well give it up for lost. But when he learned about it, one of the Garden officials, who was also a roommate, insisted on hearing every detail of my walk and then immediately set out to retrace my steps. There were others, too, who instead of taking a rest went out to look for it. I was really very embarrassed. Later, Liu, the Garden official, found it in the Four Seasons Evergreen Dining Hall of the People’s Commune. He was so happy to be able to give it back to me that I felt that what I had received from him was not a watch but a deep and genuine friendship.

  In the summer of that year the Botanical Garden established a unit of the civilian militia. They drilled every day and I registered my desire to participate. When people said that I was too old, I answered that “as a member of the big family of my motherland, I should stand on duty to defend it.”

  Finally the officials were convinced and I was allowed to participate as a member of the overaged group and I dreamed of the time my Botanical Garden unit could participate in a parade by the Gate of Heavenly Peace. My wish was realized in a very short time and I joined in a demonstration of support of the Japanese people against the “Japanese-American Security Treaty.” As we passed by the Gate, we shouted our slogan loudly: “Ten thousand years for the Chinese People’s Republic! Long live the alliance of the people of the whole world!”

  On November 26, 1960, I received my voter’s certificate with my name written on it: Aisin Gioro Pu Yi—and it seemed to me that nothing in my whole life was as valuable as this. When I placed my vote in the vermilion ballot box, I felt myself the richest man in the world. I was now a citizen of a country of 650,000,000 people and the gigantic hand that was extended by them to reach oppressed people and nationalities everywhere in the world was a reliable one.

  In March, 1961, I concluded my testing stage and was assigned to a special job in the Literature and History Material Research Commission of the National Political Alliance. My assignment was to organize and arrange the literature and historical source material of the late Ch’ing Dynasty and the subsequent Peiyang clique war-lord governments. While working, I frequently ran into names that I was quite familiar with. Sometimes I even encountered historical events which had a relationship or connection with my own past.

  After work, I continued to write my autobiography. I was supplied with valuable historical source material and some of it was copied down word for word by the hands of many friends whom I had never previously known. Part of this material was verified for me by my colleagues in the Publications Office and there were also elderly people who recalled their own experiences for me. The National Archives, the Historical Museum, the Peking Library and the Capital Library were especially helpful. I felt somewhat uneasy about receiving the assistance of so many strangers but this has become the regular way of doing things in China. Today, so long as you propagandize the truth, you receive aid from one and all including, needless to say, the Communist Party and the Government.

  1962 was a special year of happiness for me. I was invited to attend the People’s All China Political Consultative Conference, and I also audited the report of the National People’s Congress regarding China’s reconstruction. Also on May first of that year, my new wife, Li Shu-hsien, and I established our own little home. It wasn’t much but to me it was something very special—a real family unit that represented the start of a new life for me. When I looked at my wife, my voter’s certificate and the unlimited and broad future before me I knew I would never forget how I had obtained this life.

  My thoughts thus went back to the summer of 1960, two years before, when Little Jui, who had also returned to Peking, and I went on a visit to Fragrance Hill Park in the Western Hills. We had talked about the various stages of change in our thought development and I told him that as far as I was concerned, at the beginning, I had been most preoccupied with the problem of life and death and whether or not the policy of leniency would be applicable to me. What had given me the first real feeling that I might be able to live was when I had surrendered the jewelry hidden in the double bottom of my suitcase and I had received such unexpectedly lenient treatment. “When I talk about it,” I said to Little Jui, “I have you to thank for your assistance.”

  “My assistance?” he asked as he stared at me and opened his eyes. “Then you still don’t know what really happened?”

  “Of course,” I answered. “Didn’t the Center Chief ever tell you what happened? Due to the questioning of Little Ku, I admitted everything and later I had a self-criticism session with the Center Chief. I told him that when I had surrendered my things, I had not mentioned the note you had given me because I was afraid that you might receive punishment. The Chief explained that he had known all about the note and that it had been he who had asked you to write it in order to assist me in confessing of my own volition. That was the assistance to which I was referring.”

  “Judging from your description, I can see you still don’t know what the real situation was,” Little Jui replied. “You just don’t know about it. When the Center Chief asked me to write the note to you, this was not what I had wanted. It was my idea to have you searched, to confiscate your things and then have you punished.”

  This was the first time that the detailed background of these motivations was revealed to me. As Little Jui related the sequence of events, the Center Chief had refused his request. “It will be easy to search him,” the Chief had explained, “but this will not be helpful for his reform. Let’s wait and see. Searching is never as good as a voluntary confession; it will be better if he reaches self-enlightenment by himself.”

  Later, Little Jui had again talked to the Center Chief and again asked him to search me, but the Director had explained that the speed of development of each man’s thoughts was completely variable and that they should not be in a hurry. The Communist Party believed that a great majority of criminals could be reformed but that it was an individual process, requiring individual evaluation. The Chief had told Little Jui: “You should understand that it is hard for him because of his special status to believe in the policy of leniency for those who confess. If we search him, he will lose the opportunity to experience personally this policy. Let him surrender the things according to his own will. If you are in a hurry it would be better for
you to think of some way to speed up his own self-enlightenment.” As a result, it was decided that Little Jui should write the note to me.

  After the note had been passed to me and there was no immediate reaction, Little Jui had become worried and again talked with the Center Chief. “Pu Yi will never understand until his death,” Little Jui had explained. “Since he has no desire for self-enlightenment, why don’t we search him?”

  But the Center Chief had again urged patience. “From the beginning,” he had argued, “I have felt that in this case we cannot hurry. It is more essential now than ever that we not get excited.”

  Later on, of course, I had become worried and had surrendered the jewelry and from this time on I had seen a way out. “It was at this juncture,” I told Little Jui, “that I began to understand that the Government believed that a majority of the people could be reformed.”

  “But you yourself know,” Little Jui answered, “that even after this you were still persistently resisting your reformation and cheating. Several of us had already told everything to the Government, even before the special investigators had arrived.”

  At that moment, I had been looking down on Peking in the distance, fading in the light of a glorious sunset behind us, and all the events of the past ten years had come to my mind one by one. I had recalled the grayish-white hair of the Center Chief, the queer speech and voice of the young Deputy Chief of the Center; each and every one of the guards; each doctor and nurse; every single one of the Center personnel. While I had been trying to dupe them and while I was using all kinds of methods to resist them and exposing my own stupidity to the point where I no longer had felt like living, these Communist Party people had persisted in their belief that I could be remolded and had patiently guided me toward being a new man.

  “Man” was the first word I had learned to read in The Three Words Classic,43 my first primer, as a child. But in my previous life I had never appreciated the true meaning of its first four lines:

  When a man is born (Jen chih chu),

  His nature is basically good (hsing pen shan).

  Human nature is similar (hsing hsiang chin);

  Only environment makes it diverse (hsi hsiang yuan).

  Epilogue

  by Paul Kramer

  THE MANCHURIAN MONARCHY OF HENRY PU YI WAS HELD by no binding force but Japanese military power. Although the dynasty was old, the Emperor, as evidenced by this autobiography, was neither personally imposing nor attractive. Furthermore, the original Manchu majority of Manchukuo had been overwhelmed numerically by a vast influx of Chinese and a minority immigration from both Russia and Japan. None of these newer residents had a motive to make sacrifices for the Crown—the Russians because it was yellow, the Japanese because it was alien, the Chinese (Hans) because it was foreign. It thus crashed, along with the Japanese Army that was its support, a few days after Russia’s declaration of war on Japan, with no evidence of its being able to enlist popular backing against an invader of another color.

  But to suppose that the ease with which Pu Yi’s Manchu monarchy was overthrown is indicative of its political insignificance is to overlook the condition of the Sino-Soviet frontier. The border between the two countries has never in more recent times coincided with a clear delineation of the peoples who live near it. There are in China roughly two-and-a-half million Manchu people living largely north of the Great Wall and south of the Russian frontier. There are also one-and-a-half million Mongols along the frontier who have been content since the eighteenth century to accept varying forms of Manchu leadership. In addition there are an undetermined number of Manchus within the borders of the Soviet Union since the Siberian territory north of the Amur River and the present Maritime Territory of Siberia were once part of the Manchu inheritance, until detached from China and ceded to Russia in 1858 and 1860.

  Outer Mongolia, with a population of roughly a million Mongols and today a Soviet dependency, was under the Ch’ing Dynasty, a Chinese vassal. There are also Mongols living north of the frontier, in the USSR itself. The claim that China under Mao Tse-tung erased the insults in the form of territorial concessions that the imperial powers imposed upon China under the corrupt and feudal Ch’ings is belied by the dependency of Outer Mongolia on the Soviets and the existence of Vladivostok as the most important Russian naval base in the Far East.

  The political history of the northeast (Manchuria) has never been sufficiently democratic to permit the emergence through elections of popular figures among the Manchus and the Mongols to replace fully the concept of leadership vested in the theory of dynastic succession. This was one reason why the Japanese made Pu Yi Emperor of Manchukuo and sought to perpetuate and develop control of the dynastic inheritance through the marriage of his brother and heir to a Japanese noblewoman. Another reason was his utility as a device for potential Japanese expansion into Siberia and Mongolia, the Oriental populations of which could be expected to respond to the dynastic claims of Pu Yi as opposed to the colonial claims of Moscow. Pu Yi thus owed his fourteen-year restoration not, as he hoped, to the desire of the Japanese to obtain through him control of China proper, but to the intent of Japan to use him as an instrument of psychological warfare and subversion in order to win from Russia what Russia had once won from China. The Black Dragon Society was used by the Japanese imperialists to assist in the restoration of Pu Yi. It was a sort of Japanese CIA. It had always an anti-Russian direction and its name in the languages of the Orient, by a play on words, suggested Japanese expansion north of the Amur River into Siberia, not expansion south of the Great Wall into China itself.

  This identification with clandestine and subversive efforts along the Sino-Soviet frontier explains Pu Yi’s importance as well as that of his heirs. His five-year imprisonment at the hands of the Soviets and more than nine-year detention by the Chinese Communists must be examined in the light of the relations between the two countries if the future is to be understood. The fact that Pu Yi has suggested that his “brainwashing” was something separate and personal, and divorced from outside events is unrealistic—an example of Maoist Communist policy of publicly emphasizing ideology as distinguished from practical politics in its effort to capture leadership of the international Communist movement.

  The Yalta agreements of February 1945 created the opening pattern of Pu Yi’s incarceration, which began six months later. By these arrangements among the Western powers, which were later translated into an agreement between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek, Outer Mongolia became independent of China, Manchuria became a Soviet sphere of influence and Port Arthur a USSR naval base. The Northeast and Pu Yi’s Manchu people reverted to the status they enjoyed before the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, when Russia rather than Japan enjoyed paramount interest over the area.

  In view of this reversion of Manchurian suzerainty, it was only natural that when Japan was defeated in August 1945 and the monarchy crashed, Pu Yi passed from the “protection” of the Japanese to that of the USSR. This “protection” lasted from 1945 until July 31, 1950, when he was turned over to the Chinese Communists.

  Meanwhile, the Northeast underwent a similar shift from Russia to China. October 1, 1949, marked the offical beginning of the People’s Republic of China. Three months later Chairman Mao went to Moscow to confer with Stalin and brought home in February 1950 a treaty of friendship and alliance. Various concessions were made by the Soviets to their new ally, including the relinquishment of their special Manchurian rights. This was the heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation and also the time when North Korea, at Moscow’s instigation, invaded South Korea and was joined in the war by the Chinese Communists.

  At the same time, in the Thought Control Center in Fushun to which Pu Yi was consigned as a result of this Sino-Soviet accord, he experienced the most stringent “remolding.” Separated from his family, denounced by his nephews, deprived of all prerogatives, he became a nonperson. For if the Sino-Soviet frontier was to remain quiet, if there was to be no chicanery and subversion among the
border peoples in the name of race, or nationality or color, then Pu Yi had no more utility than the curios and antiques he surrendered from time to time to his captors as a testimony of his devotion.

  But on March 10, 1956, things began to improve for Pu Yi. His uncle, the former Prince Tsai Tao, was allowed to visit him in prison and give him news of the outside world and the status of the Manchu clans. Tsai Tao spoke of his election to the People’s National Congress and adverted to visits he had made to the “Northwest” and of his work with “national minorities.” These words from the lips of the former senior royal prince of China, the brother of the former Prince Regent, the uncle of the last emperor, could only mean that Chairman Mao had decided by the mid-1950s, just as the Japanese had decided in the mid-1930s, that the Manchu Aisin-Gioro clan (royal family of China) could be useful along the frontier.

  And thus, soon after Tsai Tao’s visit, Pu Yi’s treatment and that of the other Manchu detainees improved. By September 1959, Pu Yi again acquired a personality of his own. This occurred despite the fact that shortly before his pardon, the Prison Governor found him guilty of lying in order to curry favor with the authorities.

  Meanwhile, and parallel to Pu Yi’s restoration as a person, Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated. In November 1957, the Soviet Union and Communist China signed the Moscow Declaration, which was an unsuccessful attempt to heal the ideological breach that was opening between the two countries. In 1960, shortly after Pu Yi’s release from prison, Chinese students were called home from Russia and Russian technicians were withdrawn from China. Trade between the two countries slumped from $2 billion U.S. in 1959 to less than $1 billion in 1961.