At the core was the tall, thin, bespectacled, balding, quick, and dry professor. As Evans recounts, he sometimes consulted with students while walking from home to office, shaving with a portable electric razor and speed-reading a manuscript. Or he would telephone with some urgent business precisely at 8 a.m., incidentally reminding the slug-a-bed that more professional early birds were already catching scholarly worms. And there were the legendary five-minute interviews that could set the course of an academic year or even a life. "Of course you'll take intensive Chinese," he told me when at age 18, I declared my major in modern Chinese history. And as I started graduate school some years later he advised me, "Go into political science; they need China specialists."
With his efficiency and reserve, Fair bank did not talk much about whatever struggles and disappointments may have occurred behind the scenes of this smoothly functioning enterprise. Only from reading Evans' book have I learned how recent and hard-won was its apparent solidity. It took Fairbank 20 years to break down Harvard's resistance to modern Chinese studies. When I was starting out in the field, the program had just weathered a fierce attack from members of a Harvard visiting committee spearheaded by Joseph Alsop, who felt it undermined traditional Sino logical studies. Until 1965, Fairbank was barred from the Department of State as a security risk. Much of his own major scholarly work had only recently been completed, and both volumes of the Fairbank Reischauer-Craig textbook on East Asia were still in "ditto" format and had to be read on library reserve. Fairbank had just managed to get the Joint Committee on Contemporary China established along with several others, and to persuade the Ford Foundation to give money to several centers to begin what his associate, John Lindbeck, would later call "the developmental decade" of Chinese studies in America.
Walking into the middle of all this in 1960, one assumed it had always been there, just like Harvard Yard. For a former student, Evans' book has something of the quality of an Oedipal unveiling.
How did Fairbank do it? He was in the right place at the right time, as Evans suggests, but Evans has also zeroed in on personal qualities that, in my experience, were unique. Fairbank's ego was bound up in the enterprise as a whole, not in his own persona. Results were what counted, defined as professorships established, Ph.D. students graduated, books and articles published by students, and conference volumes edited. In the interests of fostering scholarly achievement, he was adept at building bridges between academia and foundations, between the conservative and liberal wings of the American China-studies establishment that had been split by the trauma of the McCarthy years, and among different national communities of China specialists in America, Asia, and Europe. He would use the rhetoric of national interest to raise money for China studies, then protect the freedom of his academic colleagues to pursue studies that were policy-irrelevant or critical of prevailing views. He didn't seem to care what was in the scholarship, so long as it was of good quality and it mounted up.
Later, in the late 1960s, when the challenge came from the left, Fairbank seemed to take pleasure in the feistiness of the younger generation he had nurtured. I was on the scene when James Peck published his critique of Fairbank for using modernization theory to construct a rationale for American intervention in Asia. The critique was published in the journal of the student-led anti-Vietnam-War group, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS). As Evans recounts, Fairbank engaged in a long public and private dialogue with Peck and others who became involved, meanwhile quietly supporting CCAS and its members in various ways. Fairbank's letters to Peck over the years pro vide some of the most self-reflective quotes in the book.
I recall Fairbank's saying, although Evans doesn't mention it, that the function of the older generation in scholarship is to have its face stepped on by the younger generation as they ascend to both higher knowledge and successful careers. If this is a special feature of American academia, Fairbank seemed to enjoy it. Evans quotes a memo Fairbank sent to a colleague in the early 1970s saying that the introductory course on East Asia should respond to student interest by including more criticism of conventional views (that is, his own). "At present [the students] have only rather vague principles formulated but see us as the targets, so I guess we can spend the fall season filling in the criticisms. It stands to reason that we should be able to think of more criticisms than they can."
This intellectual generosity helps explain why, as Evans judges, the "Harvard school" was an organizational weapon without an ideology. Fairbank could sometimes manipulate careers. I recall one instance when a fellow graduate student was outraged because Fairbank insisted on nominating someone else for a desirable Ivy League job, intending to shunt my friend to a less desirable post. On the other hand, he established publication series (Papers on China and the Harvard East Asian Monographs) partly to enable his students to get a leg up in the post-doctoral job competition, he lobbied for students' fellowships and jobs, helped them edit works for publication, connected them with scholarly presses and foundations, answered their letters promptly, and wrote effective and prompt letters of recommendation. Despite his style and middle name, he was more a facilitator than a kingpin.
Results-oriented, intellectually tolerant pragmatism was also a source of some of Fairbank's missteps as a political man and an intellectual. Characteristically, he urged Evans to expose his mistakes, and Evans has done so with in sight. He criticizes Fairbank for his optimism about the communist regime in China in the late 1940s, for his failure to take a principled civil rights stand against McCarthyism in the early 1950s, for his ambiguous interpretation of the nature of Chinese communism in the later 1950s, for his use of cold-war rhetoric to encourage funding for Chinese studies in the early 1960s, for his failure to come out clearly against .the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, for his mix of "admiration and resignation" towards Maoism in the early 1970s, and finally for his calculated down-pedaling of unpleasant truths about the Chinese regime in the same period, which he did to avoid a culturally-biased American reaction against China that would lead to political estrangement.
Fear of the consequences of cultural misunderstanding lay at the root of Fairbank's position on many of these issues. He was convinced that "cultural differences lay the powder trail for international conflict." As a historian with his eye fixed on historical continuities, he believed that the cultural gap between China and America would remain indefinitely. So he advocated what amounted to a position of cultural relativism in order to avoid fruitless, tragic international conflict. He believed that America should learn to live with a China that was different without trying to impose its own values. If this was a valid policy instinct, it led him into intellectual errors, such as assuming that cultures are essentially homogeneous and unchanging and that values are relative. Evans' biography shows that this set of attitudes was neither an intellectual doctrine nor a form of political opportunism but an instinct rooted in character.
The most striking exception to Fairbank's political tolerance was his revulsion against the KMT [Kuomintang, now the ruling party in Taiwan] in the 1940s because of its oppression of liberal Chinese intellectuals whom he admired and was close to. His attitude toward the KMT resembled the criticism of the Teng Hsiao-ping regime that many American China specialists make today, since both take American values as their baseline and defend the interests of a group within the Chinese scene that holds values closer to ours than to those of the Chinese regime. Yet his anger at the KMT contributed to his making a historiographical error, later criticized by Ramon H. Myers and Thomas A. Metzger: that of viewing the communist victory as the outcome of an inevitable historical logic—a position Fairbank later modified, as Evans points out, but one which has influenced American China scholarship.
Fairbank often wrote for the press and had a substantial influence not only on scholarship but on public opinion. But I was surprised to learn how little direct contact he had with policymakers. Nonetheless, his pragmatism has prevailed in American China policy since the 1970s, probably by and large for the best. Presumably his voice was heard through his impact on students and colleagues who themselves influenced policy or participated in making it.
In a characteristic quip, Fairbank wrote to one of his former students, "I have always been ambivalent about Fairbank ever since I found out my efforts were on the whole more highly rated by an undernourished public than they were by myself." Evans has not settled simply for laying out Fairbank's accomplishments, but has honestly and critically investigated his impact on the American understanding of China. In so doing Evans has paid him a higher tribute than mere praise, and one which I am sure Fairbank has enjoyed more. —Andrew J. Nathan is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and author of Chinese Democracy (1985) and China's Crisis (1990).