Han Suyin (韩素音)1, civil registry Chou Kuanghu, also known as Rosalie Élisabeth Comber, born September 12, 1917 in Xinyang, Henan (China), and died November 2, 2012 (aged 95). ) in Lausanne (Switzerland)2, is a writer, autobiographer, historian, sinologist and political analyst of Chinese and Belgian origin, and a doctor of medicine by training.

Writing mainly in English, but also in French and Chinese, she is the author of novels set in Asia (Destination Tchoungking, Multiple splendor, Until the morning, The Four Faces and The mountain is young, etc. .), autobiographical stories (The Wounded Tree, A Deadly Flower, A Summer Without Birds, My House Has Two Doors and The Harvest of the Phoenix) and sociopolitical essays and historical studies3,4 on modern China (The Morning Flood: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution, 1893-1954, The First Day of the World: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution, 1949-1975 and The Century of Zhou Enlai: The Revolutionary Mandarin: 1898-1998). His works have been translated into many languages5.

His autobiographical novel, Multiple Splendor, published in 1952, remains the greatest success of his career. It was adapted for cinema in 1955 by director Henry King under the title Farewell Hill, a Hollywood film which became a public and critical success: the film was nominated for eight Oscars and won three.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Han Suyin played a discreet but major diplomatic role as unofficial “spokesperson” for Mao Zedong’s China in the West6. Favorable to Maoism, but without ever having joined the Chinese Communist Party, she initially supported the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China, support which earned her criticism7,8 by human rights defenders. man, Western sinologists9,10 and by the Tibetan government in exile and its supporters.

Han Suyin, whose baptismal name was Kuanghu Matilda Rosalie Elizabeth Chou, was born on September 12, 1917, to a Chinese father of Hakka ancestry and a Belgian mother. His father's family had left northern China for Meixian County, Guangdong Province, in the 13th century, then moved to Pi County, Sichuan Province, in the 17th century.
Family origins

A scholarship recipient, his father, Yentung Chou, left Sichuan province for Europe in 1903 to study railway engineering. At the University of Brussels (Belgium), he met Marguerite Denis, who, in 1908, would become his wife, despite the prejudices of the time against interracial marriages. After the birth of their first child, in 1913, they moved to China12, where his father was to work as an engineer with the Belgian-Chinese railway company13.

Yentung and Marguerite had eight children, four of whom survived. The first, a boy born in Belgium, was sent back there to complete his schooling. A second boy, Gabriel, also called Sea Orchid, born in 1914 or 1915, died in tragic circumstances. Then the first daughter was born, Kuanghu Rosalie14. The life of the Chou-Denis couple in war-torn China is filled with hardships, including seeing their children despised as Eurasian half-breeds15. While the children were entitled to health care, their father working for the Belgian-Chinese railway company, the French doctor refused to receive them, because they were of mixed blood16.
Studies

The couple settled in Beijing in 1921. Kuanghu Rosalie received a European education and did not learn Chinese until the age of 158.

She attended Sacred Heart Girls' School, then Bridgeman Girls' College. Han Suyin would later introduce herself as a “bourgeois Catholic”17. After a brilliant education, she is determined to become a doctor. As her mother no longer wanted to pay for her studies and would prefer to see her married18, she learned typing and shorthand and, in 1931, lying about her age (she was not 15), obtained a job as a typist at the Peking Union Medical College, a hospital run by Americans. She realizes that in China, at that time, there were three salary scales: first that of "whites", then that of Eurasians and, finally, that of the Chinese. By taking on odd jobs in addition to her main job, she improves her financial situation and that of her family19. It was also at this time that she began reading to satisfy her thirst for knowledge and prepare for university studies19.

In 1933, she was admitted to Yanjing (Yenching) University in Beijing. In 1935, benefiting from a scholarship, she went to Brussels to study medicine (1933-1936). During this Belgian period, her relationships with her maternal family, Denis, were not the warmest, according to what she later recounted in A Mortal Flower. Meanwhile, the Japanese invaded China. In 1938, abandoning her medical studies, she boarded the Jean-Laborde liner19 of the Compagnie des Messageries maritimes in Marseille and returned to her country to work in a hospital20.
Marriage to Tang Pao Huang

On her return, she married Tang Pao-Huang, a Chinese engineer who had been sent for training at Sandhurst Military Academy by the Chinese government, and whom she met on the return trip on the liner. She worked at Chungking Hospital while her husband, who was one of Sun Yat-sen's disciples, served as an officer and then a general in the Nationalist army. Tang, who would prove to be a brutal husband with a feudal spirit, was appointed military attaché in London in 1944. Recalled to China, Tang was killed fighting the Communists in 194721. During this period Kuanghu Rosalie adopted her daughter Yung Mei22. These years spent with Tang will constitute the bulk of his autobographical story A Summer Without Birds19.

Encouraged and supported by an American missionary19, Kuanghu Rosalie began writing under the name Han Suyin during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). His first book, Destination Chungking (Destination Tchoungking in French), was published in England in 194223.

In 1944, she went to London to pursue medical studies and obtained her medical degree in 1948.
Affair with Ian Morrison

With her daughter, Han Suyin reached Hong Kong in February 1949. She became an assistant in the obstetrics and gynecology department at Queen Mary Hospital. She fell in love with Ian Morrison, a married English war correspondent for the London Times, but he died in Korea in 1952 while covering an episode of the war20. This love story between a Eurasian woman and a white man caused a scandal at the time, interracial relationships being poorly regarded in Hong KongHomage

A bust of Han Suyin was inaugurated on August 28, 2008 in the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Clages by the government of the canton of Valais and the Swiss Children's Space Foundation in the presence of the author34.
Political commitment

The journalist Jacques Danois describes Han Suyin as a “sympathizer of Chinese communism”13, the academic Daniel Sanderson describes her as a “defender of Red China”35. Sinologist Jean-Philippe Beja designates her as spokesperson for the regime33.

From 1956, she was regularly invited to China where she was received by Premier Zhou Enlai a dozen times. She continued her visits during the years of the Cultural Revolution. She was received by Mao Zedong in 1966 among a delegation of Asian and African authors and was a guest of honor of Jiang Qing (Mao's wife), Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan (all three members of the Gang of Four). ) during a revolutionary dance performance in 1971, according to Xinhua reports at the time33. In September 1989, she was the first foreigner to be received with “great pomp” after the demonstrations in Tian'anmen Square; it was the Vice-Premier of the People's Republic of China, Yao Yilin, who welcomed her to Diaoyutai. the residences of the official guests7.

Very attached to China, Han Suyin was favorable to Maoism but, not being a Chinese citizen, never joined the Chinese Communist Party. In 1968, she declared: “Mao is the greatest man China has known”36. She distanced herself somewhat from the communist regime after the Cultural Revolution37, which she had initially defended38. She justified herself by explaining that her relatives who remained in China “begged her not to say anything and said (him) very little” about the violence of the time and the fear of Gōngānbù and Laogaï7. After the Cultural Revolution, according to one of her former students: "she did not seem to have any regrets, she did not apologize either and she gave lessons to young Chinese not to blindly believe Western democracy and freedom ". In an interview with journalist John Gittings in London in 1990, Han said she still believed in the principles of the Cultural Revolution. It indicates that the disasters of this period were never an objective, Mao Zedong launched the movement to abolish the privileged political elite and uplift the peasants33. Han Suyin defined the Cultural Revolution as “fertile chaos” and “judged struggles to be indispensable”39.

According to AFP, in the 1960s and 1970s, Han Suyin played a discreet but major diplomatic role as ambassador to the West of the good will of Mao Zedong's China. In the 1980s, she supported Deng Xiaoping and “post-Mao” China, including on the Tibetan question, which drew criticism from supporters of Tibetan independence36.

In Europe and America, she gave more than 2,000 lectures presenting China's “progress and achievements”. In 1996, the Chinese Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries conferred on him the title of "Envoy of Friendship" in recognition of his actions in promoting cultural and scientific exchanges between China and other countries (the same honor had fallen to her husband in 1990)40.
Reviews

For the sinologist Philippe Paquet, Han Suyin is a “monument if there ever was one in literature on China, a beautiful Eurasian with an undeniable talent as a storyteller, but who, precisely, neither disdained nor reinvented History when it suited her (i.e. often)”41. Claude Roy considers that she does not tell the truth about China and notes contradictory statements between several