John K. Fairbank

John King Fairbank (May 24, 1907 – September 14, 1991), was a prominent American academic and historian of China.

Education and early career

Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota in 1907.^[1] He was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol). As an undergraduate, Charles Kingsley Webster, the distinguished British diplomatic historian then teaching at Harvard, advised him to choose a relatively undeveloped field of study, and suggested that since the Qing dynasty imperial archives were then being opened, China's foreign relations would be a prudent choice learned (Fairbank later confessed that he then knew nothing about the state of China itself). In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

At Oxford, Fairbank began his study of the Chinese language and sought the counsel of H.B. Morse, retired from the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. On Webster's advice, he had read Morse's three-volume study of Qing dynasty foreign relations on the ship coming to England. Morse became his mentor. The ambitious young scholar decided to go to Beijing to do research in 1932.^[2]

In Beijing, he studied at Tsinghua University under the direction of the prominent historian Tsiang Tingfu who introduced him to the study of newly available diplomatic sources and the perspectives of Chinese scholarship which balanced the British approaches he saw at Oxford.^[3] Wilma Cannon came to China to marry Fairbank and began a career of her own in Chinese art history. He and Wilma came to know to a number of Chinese intellectuals, and became especially warm friends with Liang Sicheng, the son of the distinguished Chinese reformer Liang Qichao, and his wife, Whei-yin, whom they called Phyllis.

The Lins introduced them to Jin Yuelin, a philosopher trained at Columbia University. Through them, Fairbank wrote later, he and Wilma began to sense the Chinese problem, the "necessity to winnow the past and discriminate among things foreign, what to preserve and what to borrow..." ^[4] In 1936, Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. for his thesis, which he revised and eventually published as Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 in 1953.

Fairbank returned to Harvard in 1936 to take up a position teaching Chinese history, Harvard's 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).^[5]

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.

Development of Chinese studies

When he returned to Harvard after the war, Fairbank inaugurated a master's degree program in Area Studies, one of several major universities in the United States to do so. The Area Studies approach at Harvard 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.^[6]

In the late 1940s, 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 relations with new China 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 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, Ch'ien Tuan-sheng, and Chen Han-seng, would later be attacked for being "pro-American" as the Chinese Communist Party became more rigidly communist.^[7] Critics in Taiwan charged that he was a tool of the Communists.^[8]

Scholarship and influence in the field

Fairbank taught at Harvard until he retired in 1977. He 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. One of his students, Paul Cohen, noted that the approaches or stages in the development of China studies of the 1950s are sometimes referred to as "the Harvard 'school' of China studies." ^[9]

Fairbank played a major role in developing Harvard as a leading American center for East Asian studies, including establishing the Center for East Asian Research which was renamed in his honor after his retirement. He was director of the Center from 1955 through 1973.^[10]

Fairbank raised money to support fellowships for graduate students, trained influential China historians at Harvard and placed them widely in universities and colleges in the US and overseas. He welcomed and funded researchers from all over the world to spend time in Cambridge and hosted a series of conferences which brought scholars together and yielded publications, many of which Fairbank edited. He established the Harvard East Asian Series which published monographs, enabling students to publish dissertations, which was essential for achieving tenure.^[11] Fairbank and his colleagues at Harvard, Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert Craig, wrote a textbook on China and Japan, A History of East Asian Civilization.^[12] Fairbank established links to figures in government both by training journalists, government officials, and foundation executives and by giving his thoughts to the government on China policy.

In 1966, Fairbank and the Sinologist Denis C. Twitchett, then at Cambridge University set in motion 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 a projected 15 volumes. Twitchett and Fairbank divided the history, with Fairbank editing volumes on modern (post 1800) China, while Twitchett and others 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. Martha Henderson Coolidge and Richard Smith completed and published Fairbank's biography of H.B. Morse.

The Vietnam War era

During the Vietnam War era of the late 1960s, Fairbank, who had earlier been criticized as being pro-communist, came under fire from younger scholars and graduate students in the newly established Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, which he helped to form but did not continue to participate in.^[13] These younger scholars charged that the Fairbank and other leaders of the area studies movement had helped to justify American imperialism in Asia. By founding the study of Asia in modernization theory, Fairbank and liberal scholars presented China as an irrational country which needed American tutelage. Fairbank rejected revolution and thereby condoned imperialism.^[14] A further charge was that scholars of the "Harvard school" put forth a "radical new version" of China's modern history that argued imperialism "was largely beneficial in China." ^[15] In December 1969, Howard Zinn and other members of the Radical Historians' Caucus tried unsuccessfully to persuade the American Historical Association to pass an anti-Vietnam War resolution. "A debacle unfolded as Harvard historian (and AHA president in 1968) John Fairbank literally wrestled the microphone from Zinn's hands"^[16] in what Fairbank called "our briefly-famous Struggle for the Mike".^[17]

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]

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about John King Fairbank, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 600+ works in 1,500+ publications in 15 languages and 43,000+ library holdings.^[18]

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

• -- The origin of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1850-58. University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 1936.
• -- The United States and China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1st ed 1948; 4th, enl. ed. 1983.
• -- 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.
• -- China: The People's Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A (Cambridge,MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).
• -- China Perceived; Images and Policies in Chinese-American Relations (New York: Knopf, 1974).
• -- Chinese-American Interactions : A Historical Summary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975).
• -- Chinabound: a fifty-year memoir. New York : Harper & Row, 1982.
• -- The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
• -- China: A New History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. Enlarged Edition, with Merle Goldman, 1998; Second Enlarged Edition, 2006. Translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Czech; OCLC 490612305^[19]

Collaborative works

• John King Fairbank, Kwang-Ching Liu, Modern China; a Bibliographical Guide to Chinese Works, 1898-1937 (Cambridge,: Harvard University Press, 1950).
• Conrad Brandt, Benjamin Isadore Schwartz John King Fairbank, eds., A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).
• Ssu-yü Têng, John King Fairbank Chaoying Fang and others. [Prepared in coöperation with the International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations] with E-tu Zen Sun, eds., China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839-1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).
• John King Fairbank, Masataka Banno, Japanese Studies of Modern China; a Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the 19th and 20th Centuries (Rutland, Vt.,: Published for the Harvard-Yenching Institute by C. E. Tuttle Co., 1955).
• Edwin O. Reischauer, John King Fairbank Albert M. Craig, A History of East Asian Civilization (Boston,: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
• Noriko Kamachi, Ichiko Chuzo & John King Fairbank, Japanese Studies of Modern China since 1953: A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social Science Research on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries : Supplementary Volume for 1953-1969 (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University : distributed by Harvard University Press, 1975).
• Denis Twitchett & John King Fairbank (eds), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978-).
• John King Fairbank, Martha Henderson Coolidge & Richard J. Smith, H. B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).

Conference volumes

• John King Fairbank, ed.,Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
• John King Fairbank, The Chinese World Order; Traditional China's Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
• Frank Algerton Kierman,John King Fairbank, eds., Chinese Ways in Warfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
• John King Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
• Suzanne Wilson Barnett John King Fairbank, ed., Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Published by the Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the Dept. of History in collaboration with the Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University : Distributed by the Harvard University Press, 1985).
• Ernest R. May, John King Fairbank, eds,, America's China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance (Cambridge, Mass: Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the Department of History in collaboration with Council on East Asian Studies distributed by Harvard University Press, 1986).

Edited letters and texts

• John King Fairbank, Katherine Frost Bruner, et al., The I. G. In Peking Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).
• Katherine Frost Bruner, John King Fairbank, et al., Entering China's Service: Robert Hart's Journals, 1854-1863 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies Distributed by the Harvard University Press, 1986).
• Richard J. Smith, John King Fairbank, et al., Robert Hart and China's Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863-1866 (Cambridge, Mass.: Published by the Council on East Asian Studies Distributed by the Harvard University Press, 1991).

Notes

References and further reading

• Alesevich, Christopher. "John King Fairbank: Present at the Creation," US-China Today, November 9, 2007.
• 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.
• Gordon, Leonard H.D.; Chang, Sydney (1970). "John K. Fairbank and His Critics in the Republic of China (Review Article)". Journal of Asian Studies 30 (1): 137–149. 
• Esherick, Joseph (1972). "Harvard on China: The Apologetics of Imperialism" (PDF). Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 4 (4): 9–17. 
• Reins, Thomas. "Fairbank, John King", in Kelly Boyd (ed.), Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (London; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999). pp. 375-377.
• Suleski, Ronald Stanley. (2005). The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University: a Fifty Year History, 1955-2005. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 097679800X/ISBN 9780976798002; OCLC 64140358

External links

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