Lo Hui-min was born in Shanghai and spent his early years in a village near Quanzhou, Fujian Province. After his mother's death in the early 1930s, he was taken by his brother to Singapore to be educated in a Seventh Day Adventist school. He returned to China and attended Yenching University. He worked as a journalist for a time, but was later arrested for organising a workers' strike. Bailed out by his brother, he travelled to London to study for his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He wrote about Sino-European diplomatic history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lo Hui-Min taught for a year in Germany before taking up a position a in the Department of Far Eastern History at the Australian National University. He wrote
The Story of China for his son. In 1981 he was elected an Ordinary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. (Source:
obituary, Colin Mackerras.)