Asian (Re)Education on Film, Episode 14

The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, UK/Italy/France/China, 1987)

For the last episode in this series, I’ll be discussing The Last Emperor, which was actually the first feature film about China that I ever saw, shortly after it came out in 1987. Unlike the other films I’ve been discussing, this is a Hollywood blockbuster with a Western director, Bernardo Bertolucci. But like Chen Kaige’s King of the Children (Episode 2), which appeared in the same year, it’s also a document of China’s liberal 1980s, the decade of Beijing’s ‘Opening Up’, when the country was more tolerant and open that it had ever been, or would subsequently become.

Bertolucci was given permission to shoot on location in Beijing’s Forbidden City, as well as in other locations such as the former palace of the Emperor of Manchukuo in Changchun. This makes for a visually stunning production, and one that I find particularly evocative. In the early 2000s, I worked in a compound just north of the Forbidden City, at the People’s Education Press (PEP). PEP’s offices were just east of Jingshan Park, and during my lunch break, I would often climb the hill in the park to admire the panoramic view of the old imperial palace.

My role at PEP was to write and edit English language textbooks for China’s secondary schools, but the sort of education with which The Last Emperor deals is rather less conventional. The central narrative thread consists of the story of the ‘re-education’ of Aising Gioro Pu Yi, the boy-emperor of the Qing Dynasty who was deposed in 1911. The film cuts backwards and forwards between the portrayal of Pu Yi’s life in a Communist-run re-education camp during the 1950s, and episodes from his earlier life. It is largely based on Pu Yi’s heavily censored autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen, published in English by Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press, which I remember seeing prominently displayed in every ‘Foreign Languages Bookstore’ on my early visits to China in the 1990s. It also draws on the book Twilight in the Forbidden City, the memoir of Pu Yi’s tutor, Reginald Johnston, a British educator whose stint at the heart of Beijing preceded mine by 80 years or so.

Pu Yi’s autobiography, which can be read as a particularly elaborate example of the Communist genre of ‘self-criticism’, was meant to showcase the regime’s humanity and integrity. ‘Re-education’, as a method for dealing with the regime's ideological opponents, was promoted as emblematic of the essential humanity of Communism. Other regimes might kill or torture their enemies: the corrupt Kuomintang, for example, whom the Communists displaced, or the brutal, hated Japanese imperialists. But Communism - as a creed underpinned by ‘science’ and enlightenment - would reason with its opponents, demonstrate to them the error of their ways, and turn them towards the one true path of progress. That, at least, was the theory that Pu Yi’s story, above all, was meant to exemplify.

As we’ll see, though, this film - despite having been made with the approval of the Communist authorities - somewhat subverts that narrative. It does so particularly through its depiction at the end of the Cultural Revolution. For that reason, amongst others, this is a film that almost certainly could not be made today. And as I’ll discuss, there is more to say about the doctrine of re-education itself, and its contemporary application in the China of Xi Jinping.

You can watch the film online here: https://archive.org/details/t-41789

Further reading:

Aising Gioro Pu Yi (1960). From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aising Gioro Pu Yi. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Reginald Johnston (1934). Twilight in the Forbidden City. Cambridge University Press (reissue 2011).

Bulag, U. E. (2023). The wheel of history and minorities’ ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese nation. Comparative Education, 60(1), 96–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2023.2271781