Fou Lei: An Insistence on Truth

Fou Lei (1908–1966) is modern China’s most renowned critic-translator, incomparable in his refined style and cosmopolitan culture. This biography is a revelation of his formative years in Europe between the Wars, and an investigation of his existential struggles between Revolutions. Other than minor corrections, this edition is identical to the Brill version (2017; 2020), discontinued since 2022.

‘A powerfully argued and deeply moving study, linking Shanghai and Paris, of one of twentieth-century China’s greatest and most courageous public intellectuals. Uncovering previously unknown primary sources that detail personal relationships in Paris, Hu Mingyuan charts the evolution of Fou Lei’s resistance to authoritarianism and the seeds of his tragic demise.’ – Claire Roberts, Professor of Art History at the University of Melbourne, author of Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong

‘Now Hu Mingyuan, a Chinese-British scholar, has published this impeccably researched and deeply sympathetic account of the evolution of Fou Lei’s mental world. Throughout the book, Hu is never afraid to think laterally and creatively, infusing a lyrical quality into her writing, a quality which lifts her work far above the run-of-the-mill academic studies of modern Chinese culture.’ – John Minford, Professor Emeritus of Chinese at the Australian National University, and Sin Wai Kin Distinguished Professor of Chinese Culture and Translation at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong

‘This is a ground-breaking biography of twentieth-century China’s greatest translator. The discoveries rigorously unearthed in Parisian archives by Dr Hu Mingyuan shed an entirely new light on Fou Lei’s links to French friends such as Jean Daniélou and René Étiemble. The reconstruction of Fou Lei’s intellectual itinerary through his brotherhood with his authors and heroes, be it Romain Rolland and his Jean-Christophe or Hippolyte Taine and his Philosophy of Art, restitutes for the reader this Insistence on Truth which gives Fou Lei’s tragic destiny its true meaning.’ – Pierre Barroux, former Consul General of France in Shanghai