At the end of World War II, Puyi was captured by the Soviet Red Army (1945). He testified at the Tokyo war crimes trial 1946. There he was scathing in his resentment of how he had been treated by the Japanese. When Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong had come to power in 1949, Puyi wrote letters to Joseph Stalin with requests not to send him back to China. He also wrote of his new life attitude, changed by the works of Karl Marx and Lenin, which he had read while in prison. However, because Stalin wished to warm his relations with a new "political friend Mao", he repatriated the former emperor to China in 1950. Puyi spent ten years in a reeducation camp in Fushun, in Liaoning province until he was declared reformed. Puyi came to Beijing in 1959, with special permission from Chairman Mao Zedong, and lived the next six months in an ordinary Beijing residence with his sister, before being transferred to a government-sponsored hotel. ,
He married Li Shuxian, a nurse, on April 30, 1962, in a ceremony held at the Banquet Hall of the Consultative Conference.
Mao began the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and the youth militia known as the Red Guards saw Puyi, who symbolized Imperial China, as an easy target of attack. With the protection of the local public security bureau, however, Puyi was put into protection, although his food rations, salary, and various luxuries, including his sofa and desk, were moved. Puyi became affected physically and emotionally. He died in Beijing of complications arising from kidney cancer, and heart disease in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution.
His brother Pujie, who married Hiro Saga, a distant cousin to the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, was proclaimed heir apparent.
