I recommend the Wikipedia article on Puyi, the last emperor of China. He was 6 years old when the 1911 Xinhai revolution forced him to abdicate, and spent the remainder of his life being courted and/or used by various actors who found his support useful to their cause.

I think it's worth reading, though it's fairly long; I think the story of his life is just pretty interesting and gripping, and the article is unusually well-written and presented in a fairly narratively engaging style. (Though I am not particularly well-versed in 20th century Chinese history and am fully deferring to Wikipedia editors on the veracity and neutrality of this account.)

It's an interesting case study of Just Some Guy being thrust into high-stakes political machinations without much independent power - if you've ever wondered how you would fare in a Game of Thrones style political intrigue, I think Puyi's story gives a decent sense: you get puppeted around by much more ruthless actors, accomplish very little of what you want, and generally have a pretty bad time.

I feel a weird mix of emotions towards the guy. He was pretty clearly an awful person almost wholly devoid of any virtue for the first several decades of his life - cowardly, vain, cruel, naive, incompetent, and a rapist. But he never really had a chance to be anything else; it's unclear if he had a single genuine relationship with someone who wasn't trying to manipulate him after age 8, and I'm not sure he had ever encountered a person earnestly doing something for moral reasons. And he lived a pretty unpleasant life during this whole time.

A couple teaser facts to entice you to read the article:

• He was incredibly clumsy. Until middle age he had never once had to do things like brush his teeth, close doors behind himself, or put anything away, because servants simply handled it all for him. Apparently a total lack of having to do things for yourself in childhood can give you a sort of developmental disorder in which you can't really pick up the habits effectively at age 40.
• He has one of the most dramatic redemption arcs of any character I know of in truth or fiction; it seems like he pretty genuinely came to regret his (many) past misdeeds and ended up as a pretty kind and humble man. This redemption arc is slightly tarnished by the fact that it, like everything else in his life, was a calculated manipulation, this time on the part of the newly formed CCP. Though it seems like they mostly just had to expose him to the reality of what he'd been complicit in, rather than any more sophisticated manipulation (and avoid letting him learn about the widespread famines).
• About the only positive influence on his life during adolescence was his English tutor Reginald Johnston, a Scottish guy who really liked monarchy (in the "emperor is basically a god" sense rather than the British sense) and had enormous influence over Puyi as the only person willing or able to say no to him.