John K. Fairbank
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John King Fairbank (b. 24 May 1907 in Huron, South Dakota; d. 14 September 1991 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was among the most prominent American scholars of East Asia in the twentieth century. His works have been translated into a number of languages, and, in China, he is known mainly by his Chinese name Fei Zhengqing (Pinyin: Fèi Zhèngqīng; 费正清).
Fairbank was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin, 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. In 1936, Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. for his thesis on the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. He returned to Harvard to take up a position teaching Chinese history.
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. During the war, Fairbank also had the opportunity to visit Chungking Chongqing, the temporary capital of Nationalist China. There, like most foreign observers, he witnessed the corruption of the government headed by Chiang Kai-shek, CKS, which left a deeply negative impression of the Kuomintang. CKS was losing the "Mandate of Heaven."
After the end of the war, Fairbank returned to Harvard, where he resumed his teaching and research duties.
In the debate why the Nationalists had lost the Mainland to the Chinese Communists in 1949, Fairbank was briefly targeted for criticism of being "soft" on Communism, and in 1952, he testified for the McCarran Committee. 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".
Fairbank remained at Harvard for the rest of his career and published a number of both academic and non-academic works on China, many of which would reach a wide audience outside academia. In 1948, he published his best-selling work The United States and China, which would be republished in several editions. He also published an expanded revision of his doctoral dissertation as Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast in 1953 and edited the Cambridge History of China. Fairbank also trained a number of influential China historians at Harvard and worked hard to make Harvard a center for Chinese studies. He founded a center for research in East Asia, which was later named the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research in his honor.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Reference
- Evans, Paul M. John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China. New York: B. Blackwell, 1988.
