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John King Fairbank: A Critical Assessment
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20358 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
7,311 Words |
| Author
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Richard C. Thornton
Richard C. Thornton is a professor of history and international
affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University in Washington, D.C. |
John King Fairbank, the father of modern Chinese studies in the United States, died on September 14, 1990. For the better part of four decades, Fairbank exercised enormous leverage on the field of Chinese studies: He influenced where and how resources would be expended; helped to train hundreds of students who went on eventually to fill high academic, government, and business positions; and shaped American attitudes toward the Chinese communist regime. It is only fitting that his role be assessed.
Fairbank's teaching career spanned forty-one years, from his appointment to the Harvard University faculty in 1936 to his retirement from full-time teaching in 1977. He traveled widely in China and East Asia, initially as a student, then for the government during World War II, and afterward as a university professor. He went to Beijing first from 1932 to 1933 as a Rhodes scholar and stayed on until 1935 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow. On leave from Harvard during World War II, Fairbank served from 1941 to 1942 as coordinator of information for the Office of Strategic Services, as special assistant to the U.S. ambassador from 1942 to 1943, in the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C., from 1944 to 1945, and as director of the U.S. Information Service in China from 1945 to 1946. After the war, Fairbank was in Japan from 1952 to 1953 as a visiting scholar and traveled through the Far East subsequently, including trips in 1972 and 1979 to the People's Republic.
He received a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University in 1936 and immediately joined the Harvard faculty, where he teamed with his colleague Edwin O. Reischauer in inaugurating a joint survey course on Asian civilization. Their pioneering effort went beyond the traditional national approach that had characterized American scholarship up to that time, and it served as a model for a growing trend to area studies, which mushroomed after World War II.
Fairbank was among the most decorated and prolific of American Asian scholars. He was recipient of fifteen honorary degrees, sole author of five major books, editor of two books of his own periodical writings, and either editor or collaborator with others on over twenty more spanning virtually the entirety of Chinese history.
As a glance at his publications indicates, the great majority of Fairbank's substantive scholarly output concerns nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. By contrast, relatively little of what he did on the communist period (from the 1920s to the present) can be classified as scholarly
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