Fairbank, John King

(b. 24 May 1907 in Huron, South Dakota; d. 14 September 1991 in Cambridge, Massachusetts), widely regarded as the most influential historian of modern China and the virtual founder of modern Chinese studies in the United States.

Fairbank was the only child of Arthur Boyce Fairbank, a lawyer, and Lorena King, a homemaker and minor civic leader. In 1911 the family moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Fairbank attended public schools for three years. In 1923 he enrolled at a prestigious private school in New Hampshire, Phillips Exeter Academy, from which he graduated two years later as valedictorian. He then matriculated at the University of Wisconsin for two years before transferring to Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in 1929. Having won a Rhodes scholarship, he studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and was awarded a B. Litt. degree in 1931. Spurred on by diplomatic historian Charles Kingsley Webster at Oxford, Fairbank decided to become a scholar on China.

Initially supported by the Rhodes trust, Fairbank lived in China from 1932 to 1935, mastering the language and travelling extensively throughout the nation. He served as a lecturer at Tsing Hua (Qinghua) University in the academic year 1933–1934 and the following year was a fellow of the Rockefeller-supported General Education Board in Peking (Beijing). In 1936 Oxford University awarded him a D.Phil, degree. His dissertation, much revised and titled Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854, was eventually published in 1954. In 1932 he married Wilma Denio Cannon, a writer, artist, and Orientalist. The couple adopted two children.

In 1936, on his return to the United States, Fairbank joined the faculty of Harvard University as an instructor. There he and his colleague Edwin O. Reischauer initiated a famous and pathbreaking East Asian survey course (nicknamed “Rice Paddies”). During World War II, Fairbank first served in Washington, D.C., on the Far Eastern staff of the Research and Analysis branch of the Office of the Coordinator of Information, renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942. In August 1942 he was sent to Chungking (Chongking), China, where his task was to find and microfilm Japanese and Chinese publications for the OSS. During 1943 he was a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador in Chungking, essentially a titular post, in which capacity he acted as informal agent of the State Department’s Cultural Relations Division. He also purchased Chinese materials for the Library of Congress as its official representative and directed the American Publications Service, which distributed microfilmed American writings to Chinese scholars and libraries. Late in 1943 he returned to Washington to work in the Office of War Information, acting occasionally as deputy director in charge of Far Eastern operations. From October 1945 to July 1946 Fairbank was back in China to direct the U.S. Information Service, administering ten branch offices from a headquarters in Shanghai and in the process forming a favorable view of the Chinese Communists. He later claimed, “I was committed to viewing ‘communism’ as bad in America but good in China, which I was convinced was true.”

Fairbank returned to Harvard in 1946, where he became full professor two years later. In 1959 he received one of the nation’s best-endowed chairs, the Francis Lee Higginson Professorship of History. His publications were prodigious, both in popular and scholarly journals. His book The United States and China (1948; revised and enlarged in 1958, 1971, 1979, 1983) was often praised as the best short introduction to China. Fairbank aptly called it “a home run with bases loaded.” With Japan expert Reischauer, he wrote East Asia: The Great Tradition: A History of East Asian Civilization (1960) and East Asia: The Modern Transformation (1965; additional coauthor Albert Craig); both books later appeared in condensed versions. Fairbank’s autobiography Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (1982) drew on diary notes of his trips to China. The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985 (1986) drew strong parallels between imperial China and the regime of Mao Tze-tung (Mao Zedong). China: A New History (1992) again focused on problems of state power and dissonance. Other works included anthologies, documentary collections, annotated bibliographies, and collections of his own essays. In 1966, along with Denis Twitchett, he was appointed general editor of the multivolume Cambridge History of China, 1800–1980.

Fairbank threw himself into promoting East Asian studies, so much so that he epitomized the academic entrepreneur. In 1956 he became the director of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center (renamed in 1977 the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research). It sponsored countless grants, conferences, and publications, including the annual Papers on China series. In 1959 he helped spearhead the Social Science Research Council’s Joint Committee on Contemporary China and in 1962 the American Council of Learned Societies’ Committee on Studies of Chinese Civilization.

Not surprisingly, Fairbank received many honors, among them two Guggenheim fellowships (Japan, 1952–1953; Asia and the USSR, 1960), a $10,000 prize from the American Council of Learned Societies (1960), and the presidencies of the Association for Asian Studies (1959–1960) and the American Historical Association (1968–1969) ; the latter organization created a John King Fairbank Prize in 1968 to recognize biannually the best North American book on East Asia.

Though he remained at the heart of the academic establishment, Fairbank’s public persona was always controversial. In January 1950 Congressman John F. Kennedy attacked Fairbank on the House floor for being instrumental in the fall of Nationalist China. In August 1951 Louis F. Budenz, former editor of the Communist Daily Worker, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Internal Security Subcommittee. Budenz named forty-three persons, Fairbank among them, as belonging to the Communist party in the 1940s. Meeting in mid-March 1952 with the committee in private and public session for close to eight hours, Fairbank denied all charges under oath and expressed deep contempt for international communism. Despite his testimony, his passport to Japan was held up for seventeen months.

By 1950 Fairbank found China possessing “totalitarian tendencies.” He supported the initial American effort in the Korean War, including the reunification of all Korea, though he sharply dissented from the strategy advocated by General Douglas A. MacArthur. From 1949 on he endorsed American recognition of Communist China and its representation on the United Nations Security Council. Beginning in 1954, when France lost Dienbienphu, Fairbank endorsed U.S. support for a non-Communist Vietnam. By 1969, however, he was sharply critical of American intervention there. In 1972, after the Nixon-Kissinger accord with the regime of Mao, he returned to China and was one of a select group of scholars who met with Premier Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai). For a brief time he was euphoric over the People’s Republic of China, in 1975 calling Mao “the greatest emancipator of all time.” Soon, however, he was writing that “the Chinese path to socialism had led over a cliff,” in the process accusing Mao of responsibility for 20 million deaths. In 1977 Fairbank retired from the Harvard faculty. Two years later he had a severe heart attack. He had another heart attack in 1991 and died in Cambridge.

Fairbank’s manner was formal and courtly, his wit sardonic. A tireless worker, indeed relentless in pursuing his goal of Chinese studies, he nonetheless exercised paternal care of several generations of China scholars.

The Fairbank papers are at the Widener Library, Harvard University. Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Fairbanks Remembered (1992), contains the testimony of 127 friends and colleagues. Albert Feuerwerker et al., eds., Approaches to Modern Chinese History (1967), is a Festschrift presented to Fairbank on his sixtieth birthday. Paul M. Evans, John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China (1988), offers a thorough intellectual and personal biography, in the process analyzing his scholarship. For a more critical treatment, see Steven W. Mosher, China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality (1990). An obituary is in the New York Times (16 Sept. 1991).

Justus D. Doenecke