I understand the reasoning and I'm not interested in passing moral judgement on people in desperate circumstances over a 100 years ago.
Keeping dethroned monarchs alive doesn't have to end badly though. The last Chinese emperor was successfully re-educated and spent the rest of his life living a completely normal and by all accounts happy life in Beijing. The former imperial dynasty still lives in China, and the guy who would have been the heir to the throne had served as an elected coffee politician. Despite this monarchism is virtually non-existing as a political force in China.
Are the conditions similar enough? China was after a second world war when monarchy worldwide had far less influence than 1917. While they were facing outside pressure after the revolution it was in proxy wars and via more significant rallying points such as Taiwan/Tibet. Both of those serve that same role but a 1917 monarch would be more culturally/politically relevant. It being a European monarch would mean the revolution is right outside France/Germany/Nonce Island instead of mostly threatening whatever colonial holdings around China that Europe could still manage. The empires opposing Bolshevism in the 1920s were the strong victors of WW1 instead of the mostly ravaged opposition to the CCP excluding the US, and they did just that with the Dalai Lama.
I understand the reasoning and I'm not interested in passing moral judgement on people in desperate circumstances over a 100 years ago.
Keeping dethroned monarchs alive doesn't have to end badly though. The last Chinese emperor was successfully re-educated and spent the rest of his life living a completely normal and by all accounts happy life in Beijing. The former imperial dynasty still lives in China, and the guy who would have been the heir to the throne had served as an elected coffee politician. Despite this monarchism is virtually non-existing as a political force in China.
Are the conditions similar enough? China was after a second world war when monarchy worldwide had far less influence than 1917. While they were facing outside pressure after the revolution it was in proxy wars and via more significant rallying points such as Taiwan/Tibet. Both of those serve that same role but a 1917 monarch would be more culturally/politically relevant. It being a European monarch would mean the revolution is right outside France/Germany/Nonce Island instead of mostly threatening whatever colonial holdings around China that Europe could still manage. The empires opposing Bolshevism in the 1920s were the strong victors of WW1 instead of the mostly ravaged opposition to the CCP excluding the US, and they did just that with the Dalai Lama.
So it happened once and has been a disaster pretty much every other time.