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tnt307's review against another edition
1.0
Přečetla jsem kousek, ale nezaujalo mě to. Četla jsem Tajný deník čínské císařovny a ten mě hodně bavil, a bylo zajímavé viděl Tiksi/Ch-si z jiné perspektivy, ale celkově to působilo až moc zdlouhavě.
rotorguy64's review against another edition
4.0
This book becomes even better when you remember that it was written after Pu Yi got out of a communist brainwashing camp. The entire thing reeks of Stockholm-Syndrome, particularly the shame with which Pu Yi speaks of his time as child emperor and his gratefulness to the people that imprisoned him without a trial. Especially shocking is that the commie bastards he swore loyalty to later went on to betray him. From Emperor To Citizen is not just a lesson in Chinese history, it's an even more powerful lesson on why you should never trust a collectivist.
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
2.0
Obviously I feel bad for the bloke, but man, it sure is obvious that he had to write this under the watchful eye of the CCP censorship board.
nwhyte's review against another edition
4.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3600842.html
I generally enjoy biographies and autobiographies, and this was no exception. Obviously we lack the visual texture of the film, but we get a lot more political analysis and also some more interesting characters - Puyi's father is a major if ineffectual presence in the earlier part, for instance, and Yasunori Yoshioka, Puyi's Japanese minder during the Manchuria period, is devastatingly depicted. (They communicated in English, as Puyi spoke no Japanese and Yoshioka's Chinese was poor.) Interesting to note that Reginald Johnston was not yet 40 when hired by the imperial household; Peter O'Toole was 55 in 1987.
One really important point that is left out of the film entirely: Puyi and his family were Manchu rather than Han. This is a major source of tension between the imperial court and the rest of China for the first half of the twentieth century, and then weirdly provides Mao with a good reason to keep the former emperor and his family around rather than eliminate them, in order to keep the border tribes happy.
It's also interesting that Puyi is a much less pleasant character in his own book than in the film. (Though even the book omits his worst behaviour.) Of course, this is partly because as a result of his process of reorientation (what we might now call brainwashing), he felt the need to admit to his former faults as a human being. The film needs to portray him as an innocent to whom things happen; the book makes it clear that to the extent that this was true, he found it deeply frustrating.
You don't get many autobiographies by former emperors. It's not clear to me if this was ghost-written - I've seen attributions to Puyi's brother Pujie, and also to Lao She, author of Cat Country; but actually I have little difficulty in accepting that he probably wrote most of it himself - he writes a lot about writing, which suggests that it was an activity he enjoyed and was possibly good at. Edited to add: I really did not dig very far on this point; it's fairly well recorded that the ghostwriter was Li Wenda of the People's Publishing Bureau, although Puyi's widow successfully sued him for the full copyright on the book (it had originally been split between ex-emperor and ghostwriter). Pujie (who lived to 1994) and Li Wenda were brought in as advisers for the film.
I generally enjoy biographies and autobiographies, and this was no exception. Obviously we lack the visual texture of the film, but we get a lot more political analysis and also some more interesting characters - Puyi's father is a major if ineffectual presence in the earlier part, for instance, and Yasunori Yoshioka, Puyi's Japanese minder during the Manchuria period, is devastatingly depicted. (They communicated in English, as Puyi spoke no Japanese and Yoshioka's Chinese was poor.) Interesting to note that Reginald Johnston was not yet 40 when hired by the imperial household; Peter O'Toole was 55 in 1987.
One really important point that is left out of the film entirely: Puyi and his family were Manchu rather than Han. This is a major source of tension between the imperial court and the rest of China for the first half of the twentieth century, and then weirdly provides Mao with a good reason to keep the former emperor and his family around rather than eliminate them, in order to keep the border tribes happy.
It's also interesting that Puyi is a much less pleasant character in his own book than in the film. (Though even the book omits his worst behaviour.) Of course, this is partly because as a result of his process of reorientation (what we might now call brainwashing), he felt the need to admit to his former faults as a human being. The film needs to portray him as an innocent to whom things happen; the book makes it clear that to the extent that this was true, he found it deeply frustrating.
You don't get many autobiographies by former emperors. It's not clear to me if this was ghost-written - I've seen attributions to Puyi's brother Pujie, and also to Lao She, author of Cat Country; but actually I have little difficulty in accepting that he probably wrote most of it himself - he writes a lot about writing, which suggests that it was an activity he enjoyed and was possibly good at. Edited to add: I really did not dig very far on this point; it's fairly well recorded that the ghostwriter was Li Wenda of the People's Publishing Bureau, although Puyi's widow successfully sued him for the full copyright on the book (it had originally been split between ex-emperor and ghostwriter). Pujie (who lived to 1994) and Li Wenda were brought in as advisers for the film.
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