Born in Jiading, Jiangsu (now Jiading, Shanghai) in 1894, Lu Jie 陆洁was forced to drop out of middle school in 
1910 when economic setbacks plunged his family into poverty. He went to Shanghai to find an apprenticeship, but then moved on to Singapore to seek his fortune. After applying himself to self-study, and mastering English, he returned to Shanghai in 1918 and went to work for the Y
MCA. He acquired a strong interest in movies, and with Gu Kenfu and Zhang Guangyu founded "Motion Picture Review," China's first movie magazine. Lu Jie's responsibility was translating and writing articles dealing with foreign motion pictures. In addition, he initiated and standardized translations of foreign film terminology into Chinese, coining such terms as "daoyan" 导演 (direction), "mingxing" 明星 (star) and "dianying benshi" 电影本事 (filmability) for Chinese filmmakers and fans.
In 1923, Lu Jie started a business specifically aimed at handling advertising for each of Shanghai's film studios and in connection with this began publication of another of China's earliest movie magazines, "Movie Semiweekly." While it lasted only two months, Lu brought out more than 20 issues during that time.
Lu Jie joined the Da Zhonghua Film Company in February, 1924 as a writer, and when that studio merged in the following year with the Baihe studio, he was a key figure in the work of reorganization. Lu continued as a screenwriter for the new company, and either wrote the scripts or contributed the subtitles for some of the studio's most successful films throughout the rest of the 1920s. By the end of that decade, the overall high quality of his work was regarded as a standard for China's growing film industry. At the beginning of the 1931, he was named head of the Lianhua Film Company's No.2 studio, and under his stewardship the studio turned out a succession of recognized classics from China's first golden age of moviemaking, including "Little Toys," "Song of the Fishermen," and "The Big Road." During Shanghai's "Orphan Island" period, Lu pulled together the management, administration and talent of three small, struggling wartime studios into one which survived for much of the war.
When the Wenhua film studio was established in October, 1946, Lu Jie assumed the dual posts of general manager and studio head. Although the company had fewer than 50 employees in total, under his management the Wenhua studio was able to produce four quality productions a year. After the founding of the People's Republic, he held a succession of consulting posts, first for the Shanghai Film Studio and later for the Shanghai Municipal Film Bureau. During his many years of service to China's movie industry, Lu Jie acquired a large collection of memorabilia related to Chinese cinema, a collection he donated to the country upon his retirement.
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Filmography:
1924
Public Opinion – writer
1925
Amid the Battle of Musketry – writer
Young Factory Manager – director
1926
Reclaim the Wasteland – writer
Transparent Shanghai – director
1927
The Sex-Trap (I,II) – co-directed
1928
A Complicated Plot (I,II) – writer, director
