John K. Fairbank

John King Fairbank (24 May 1907 - 14 September 1991) (Chinese: 费正清; pinyin: Fèi Zhèngqīng), was a prominent American academic and historian of China.

Education and early career

Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota on 24 May 1907.^[1] He was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol). In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in order to study British imperial history. At Oxford, Fairbank learned that the Qing imperial archives were being opened, and he decided to go to Beijing to do research for his doctoral degree in 1932. In Beijing, he studied at Tsinghua University under the direction of the prominent Chinese historian Tsiang Tingfu. Wilma Cannon came to China to marry Fairbank and began a career of her own in Chinese art history. In 1936, Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. for his thesis on the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs.

He returned to Harvard in 1936 to take up a position teaching Chinese history, the first full time specialist on that subject. He and Edwin O. Reischauer worked out a year long introductory survey which covered China and Japan, and later Korea and Southeast Asia. The course was known as "Rice Paddies," and became the basis for the influential texts, East Asia: The Great Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and East Asia: The Modern Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).^[2]

War service and the controversy over the "Loss of China"

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Fairbank was enlisted to work for the US government, which included service in the OSS and the Office of War Information in Chongqing, the temporary capital of Nationalist China. There, like most foreign observers, he witnessed the corruption of the government headed by Chiang Kai-shek, which left a deeply negative impression of the Kuomintang. When he returned to Harvard after the war, he inaugurated a Master's Degree program in Area Studies. The Area Studies approach was multi-disciplinary and aimed to train journalists, government officials, and others who did not want careers in academia. This broad approach, combined with Fairbank's experience in China during the war, shaped his United States and China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Foreign Policy Library, 1948). This survey went through new editions in 1958 and 1970, each synthesizing scholarship in the field for students and the general public. In 1972, in preparation for Nixon's visit, the book was read by leaders on both sides.^[3]

Fairbank was among the so-called China Hands who predicted the victory of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party and advocated establishing relations with the new government. Although Fairbank argued that this would be in the American national interest, many Americans accused the China Hands of selling out an ally and promoting the spread of Communism and Soviet influence. In 1949, Fairbank was targeted for criticism of being "soft" on Communism, and was denied a visa to visit Japan. In 1952, he testified before the McCarran Committee, but his secure position at Harvard protected him. Ironically, many of Fairbank's Chinese friends and colleagues who returned to China after 1949, such as Fei Xiaotong and Chen Han-seng, would later be attacked for being "pro-American".^[4]

Development of China Studies

John S. Service, John Paton Davies, Jr., and John Fairbank in 1971

Fairbank taught at Harvard until he retired in 1977 and published a number of both academic and non-academic works on China, many of which would reach a wide audience outside academia. He also published an expanded revision of his doctoral dissertation as Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast in 1953. Fairbank also trained a number of influential China historians at Harvard and welcomed researchers from all over the world to spend time in Cambridge. He raised money for publication series and for the East Asian Research Center, which was later named the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research in his honor. The Center hosted a series of conferences which brought scholars together and yielded publications, many of which Fairbank edited. He was known as a relentless but supportive editor.^[5]

In 1966, Fairbank and the Sinologist Denis C. Twitchett, then at Cambridge University set in motion the plans for The Cambridge History of China. Originally intended to cover the entire history of China in six volumes, the project grew until it reached its present expected size of 15 volumes. Twitchett and Fairbank divided the history between them, with Fairbank editing the volumes on modern (post 1800) China, while Twitchett took responsibility for the period from the Qin to early Qing. Fairbank edited and wrote parts of volumes 10 through 15, the last of which appeared in the year after his death.

Death

Fairbank finished the manuscript of his final book, China: A New History in the summer of 1991. On September 14, 1991 he delivered the manuscript to Harvard University Press, then returned home and suffered a fatal heart attack.^[1]

Representative works

• Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
• "Patterns Behind the Tientsin Massacre." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20, no. 3/4 (1957): 480-511.
• Ch'ing Administration: Three Studies. (with Têng Ssu-yü) Harvard-Yenching Institute Studies, V. 19. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
• Chinabound: a fifty-year memoir. New York : Harper & Row, 1982.
• The United States and China. 4th, enl. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
• China: A New History. (with Merle Goldman) Enl. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

References

Further reading

• Evans, Paul M. John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China. New York: B. Blackwell, 1988.
• Paul A. Cohen Merle Goldman, eds., Fairbank Remembered (Cambridge, Mass.: Published by the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research Harvard University : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1992). Brief reminiscences by students, colleagues, friends, and family.

External links

• Harvard biography
• Bibliography
• John King Fairbank: Present at the Creation