John King Fairbank was the most influential figure in post-War American China studies. Starting on the Harvard faculty in 1936, he pioneered a new approach to the study of China, one that substituted concerns for current history, society, and economics for the then-dominant classical Sinology. This new approach, riding a tide of foundation money and with Fairbank's students as its disciples, conquered American higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, Fairbank became perhaps the most influential general commentator on China: he authored or edited twenty-five books, as well as countless articles, both scholarly and popular. By the 1960s Fairbank's ideas had come to frame the American intellectual and foreign policy debates about China, while his personality was the subject of endless academic gossip.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Fairbank's last book, completed shortly before his death in September 1991, will be read by many not so much for what it says about the Chinese past as for what it reveals about its author. This is appropriate, for despite his writing and teaching, his many friendships, and his well-known public persona as the benign and dryly humorous "Dean" of American China studies, Fairbank was in many ways an enigmatic figure, both personally and intellectually. China: A New History is just that, a history, and it therefore cannot give more than hints about some of the puzzles. But these hints it provides in abundance.
To say that Fairbank was puzzling may raise some eyebrows, for in writing and in person he always seemed to be perfectly clear. His written English was lucid, and almost informal in tone; his lectures the same. And unlike many academics, he was generous and accessible, providing his graduate students with keys to the Widener Library study where he kept his personal books and meeting this reviewer for a tutorial over breakfast on more than one occasion. He and his wife, Wilma, were among the last to maintain the fine Harvard tradition of serving weekly afternoon tea, open to all. Yet his 1982 attempt at autobiography, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir, for all its interest, is generally conceded to reveal almost nothing about the private, or the inner man.
By specialization, Fairbank was a historian of the Ching (1644-1911), the last of China's imperial dynasties. Intellectually, his greatest concern was with continuity and change in Chinese history, and in particular with the light the Chinese past sheds on the present. Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s when many Americans thought of the Chinese mainland as "Red China," controlled by an alien and sinister regime, Fairbank provided an alternative interpretation, which he worked out most completely in the four editions of his classic and regularly reprinted book, The United States and China, first published in 1948.
This interpretation saw the "People's Republic" not as some transplant from Moscow, but rather as a logical culmination of several thousand years of dynastic rule, which could be understood—and dealt with—as such. Thus, Mao Tse-tung seemed to Fairbank to be a Marxist version of a traditional emperor; the Communist Party was a new incarnation of the old bureaucratic elite recruited through the examination system; and Marxism itself was a new orthodox ideology to take the place of Confucianism, suitably Sinified by Mao. But there were also changes and differences. Fairbank was fond of summing up what the revolution meant by saying that, after 1949, the min (people) had displaced Tien (Heaven) as China's ultimate sovereign.
What, then, were the puzzles about Fairbank? One, certainly, had to do with his real feelings about the People's Republic, a topic about which he always spoke with a certain ambiguity. This, however, did not save him from being anathematized in the 1950s by the China Lobby, as well as attacked in the 1960s by the radical Concerned Asian Scholars. He attracted this fire from two quite different political directions because his analysis of how the People's Republic fit into the broad pattern of the Chinese past was itself a two-edged sword. It could be taken as justifying the regime, by giving it a historical stamp of approval, and this offended the right. But the same approach also relativized and historicized the new regime, threatening its many claims to complete novelty, and this angered the left.
Fairbank was most clearly upbeat about the Peking regime during the 1970s. It was then, in regular reviews, that he administered sharp slaps on the wrist to writers who were beginning to reveal what we now know to have been the truth about Communist China. For example, Ivan and Miriam London's Revenge of Heaven, one of the first authentic Red Guard narratives, was judged sternly in the New York Review of Books in 1972, the same year in which he penned his extraordinary (and widely quoted) statement that the revolution had been "the best thing that ever happened to China." When the new diplomacy of the 1970s followed closely the recommendations he had spelled out regularly in Foreign Affairs and other forums, it must have seemed as if everything was going his way.
But the unexpected result of the opening of mainland China was instead to put the Fairbank view into intellectual jeopardy. The cautiously favorable image of the People's Republic, hitherto generally accepted in the West thanks in no small part to Fairbank's efforts, slipped away. By the 1980s challenges were coming fast and furious: the realization that communist economic policies had been a failure; first-hand testimony about political arrests and human rights violations: understanding that there was dissent. But the greatest challenge for Fairbank, both intellectual and personal, was posed by the collapse of communism in the West and the Tienanmen massacre. These came very late in his life, and they threatened the intellectual foundations of the whole structure of understanding China to which he had devoted decades.
China: A New History can be read as a response to these challenges, and it is one that will gladden in particular those who knew and cared about Fairbank. It manifests a remarkable ability to find intellectual bearings in the face of discrepant developments. More than that, it reveals a Fairbank comfortable and confident as he criticizes the Chinese present, evidently exhilarated to discard the intellectual baggage of the 1960s and 1970s (his earlier comment about the revolution being the best thing for China. for example, he nails as "sentimental Sinophilia"). This in turn suggests that aspects of Fairbank's public and intellectual role as interpreter of the New China were more difficult and made him more uncomfortable than many people had suspected.
On one level, China: A New History is just what its title suggests—a comprehensive narrative, informed throughout by the latest scholarship, that takes us from the Paleolithic almost to the present. Fairbank was a hard and conscientious worker, and those who knew him will not be surprised that although finished in 1991, the book refers repeatedly to work published only in the following year.
But on another level, the book is something far more interesting and complex. It is a meditation on the historical origins and significances of recent events in mainland China, centered on an issue rarely broached in his earlier work: the relationship between culture and violence in Chinese history.
The impact of China's new present and the new questions it poses is clear from the very beginning. For people interested in the imperial dynasties and Communist China, Chinese history has traditionally begun with Chin Shih Huang, the "first emperor," who—so the story used to go—welded a loose cultural China of states together, creating through blood and iron a polity that has endured ever since.
But this account of where Chinese unity came from has been greatly modified by the work of Fairbank's Harvard colleague, the archaeologist K.C. Chang. He argues that in China cultural unity came into being before political, through the relatively peaceful spread of shared ritual and kinship, and not through coercion. Fairbank base his new narration of the earliest dynasties—Hsiao, Shang, and Chou—on Chang's work, giving primacy at the outset to culture rather than force.
In this Fairbank seems to agree with the stream of Chinese philosophy that has long maintained that culture and morality can build societies—that they have potency (and Fairbank notes how A.C. Graham renders as "potency" the Chinese word te, more commonly translated as "virtue"). This is certainly the most "cultural" history of China Fairbank has ever written. It quotes poetry, reproduces paintings, discusses architecture, even points out that the terra-cotta army found in 1974 at the first emperor's tomb disproves the theory, current up to the 1930s, that China had no sculpture in the round until Buddhism.
But Fairbank takes this new emphasis on culture in a direction that historians who stress culture, and wen (the civil) over wu (the military) will not find welcome: he asks about the limits of cultural state-building. Fairbank develops the theme with some care in his chapters on the Tang and Sung dynasties, which show the influence of another Harvard colleague, Peter Bol, and in his treatment of the conquest dynasties, whose rulers came from Inner Asia. Fairbank notes that although Chinese political theory stressed virtue, in fact the political system always rested on the authority of an emperor having absolute power over life and death. Morally-minded scholars might question the way this or that emperor used the power, but none challenged its legitimacy or philosophical basis.
For those who like to picture traditional China as fundamentally a kingdom of virtue, these are troubling facts, and Fairbank drives them home again and again. He notes the paradoxes of cultural flowering and military weakness in the Sung, and then he inquires about the interdependence of morality and force as he examines how the non-Chinese conquest dynasties such as the Chin nonetheless were served by Confucian scholars and were ultimately viewed as part of the legitimate dynastic succession. His conclusion, which builds on Mark Edward Lewis's work on sanctioned violence in ancient China, is that the Chinese system could not work without at least the possibility of unlimited coercion.
Fairbank even propounds a theory about the importance of the conquest dynasties: that they greatly reinforced the tendency to rely on the ultimate sanction of violence, which had been evident even in areas of purely Chinese culture. Theoretical political absolutism (Chinese) was combined with military power (nomadic) to base the institutions of subsequent Chinese civilization firmly on coercion and violence. The theme can be followed right down to Tienanmen.
Of course the book contains much else besides a consideration of violence. The Ching receives careful attention. Like Franklin Roosevelt, who once instructed two assistants to "weave together" for a speech their recommendations about the gold standard (one for, one against), Fairbank blends the complex economic disputes of the historians of agriculture (some of whom see development, others stagnation) into a single readable, if not entirely consistent, narrative. Treatment of the Republic reflects the state of the field—still not quite able to grasp the historiographical implications of the failure of communism, and more inclined to set the stage for 1949 than to treat the period on its own terms. Thus the chapter called "China's War of Resistance" has something to say about inflation, Mao's remaking of Marxism, and American policy toward the United Front between Communists and Nationalists, but nothing about the actual war in which millions of Chinese died. Coverage of the communist period is up to date, and entirely unapologetic.
As for postwar Taiwan, rarely an object of Fairbank's affection, it is illuminated by a typically well-chosen nugget of information (Fairbank was master of the revealing detail), about the post-1949 careers of 31 Nationalist National Resources Commission engineers sent to study in the United States in 1942: "The great majority (21) elected to work for the new state on the mainland. Only seven went to Taiwan. The result is instructive. Of the 21 highly trained engineers on the mainland, none attained ministerial or important executive rank; all suffered political persecution. Of the seven engineers on Taiwan, three headed state-run industries and two became ministers of economic affairs, of whom one later headed all economic planning and development and the other went on to be premier."
China: A New History, then, is a remarkable recasting of the old Fairbank approach. But as already mentioned, it is also revealing in many ways about Fairbank as a person. Most striking is its tone. Along with the expansiveness and assured judgment that are the hallmarks of genuinely mature historical writing, it has also a freshness and vitality that are unexpected in a book by a man of eighty-four. These are all the more remarkable when juxtaposed with the peevish and frustrated tone of its immediate predecessor. The Great Chinese Revolution (1986), which found Fairbank still trying to make sense of a revolution that, as he half understood, just didn't add up. One feels that writing the latest book was more than an intellectual, summing-up; it was also a personal retrospect, even a liberation.
In the new approach, violence and coercion sit at the center of Chinese political tradition. Fairbank has long seemed to argue that historical precedent and continuity say a lot about what is good or bad in the present, so it is interesting to see where he takes this in sight. It would, after all, form an even firmer intellectual basis than his earlier view did for understanding, relativizing, and even explaining away the oppression, death, and violence that continue in the People's Republic. But does Fairbank use his new theory for apologetic purposes? He does not. Instead, Fairbank criticizes the current Peking regime for its employment of violence, and enunciates values that can only be called "liberal" And this fact suggests an answer to the basic puzzle about Fairbank mentioned above.
One reading of Fairbank's life suggests that he was personally far more committed to the left than was ever apparent in his carefully modulated public statements and writing. Evidence for this would come from his friendships and private writings. Thus Chinabound, his description of life in Peking from 1932-35, frequently mentions Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow, and other sympathizers of the communist movement; in the same book he quotes a letter of his own sent from Chungking to Washington in 1942, lamenting the defects of the Kuomintang, and speculating that only "the Great Chinese Revolution" can save the country. Certainly some of his public statements in the 1970s would have been consistent with such an orientation.
But the evidence of China: A New History suggests another, and to this reviewer far more convincing, explanation. Fairbank's decades-long run as interpreter of the People's Republic was unanticipated and uncomfortable, accepted as a matter of American patriotic duty, and relinquished with considerable relief at the end of his life.
Fairbank's education does not suggest someone secretly bedazzled by the left. Born in 1907, he attended Exeter, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard. At Oxford, where he began his China studies as a Rhodes Scholar in 1929, he chose to study with Charles Webster, a European diplomatic historian who set him to work on Chinese-British relations in the nineteenth century. This culminated in his most scholarly book, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, published only in 1953, to which Fairbank probably devoted more effort than to any other he wrote.
At Oxford Fairbank clearly had decided that he would make his way by explaining China to America and the world. But what China? On the evidence of what he chose to pay attention to, he expected a China that would be an increasingly important player in international trade and diplomacy, democratizing internally and in regular and growing contact with the West. Moreover, he expected that the precedents and the historical trains of events begun in the nineteenth century would still be alive. Fairbank's expectations for post- War China, in other words, were probably not unlike those of the many progressive-minded but democratic Chinese he calls Sino-liberals.
But through an accident of history it was not that China, but rather the new, People's China that Fairbank found him self explaining, and it was in that China that his Sino-liberal friends lived out their lives. But explaining People's China was not the task for which Fairbank had prepared himself, nor was it particularly easy or congenial. It was hard because access to China was ruled out, and painful be cause of the political controversy it aroused no matter what one said. But it was probably most difficult because it required continual bargaining with one's own integrity. Were the reports of atrocities from mainland China true or were they inventions? If true, how should they be viewed: as evils, or as perhaps necessary steps in a broadly constructive program? By what morality should they be evaluated? How could an American presume to judge?
Fairbank might have run away from the whole thing, by studying history only and avoiding the present. But he did not, and I think the reason was initially a sense of intellectual and civic duty (joined for a while by a sincere belief that Mao was getting things right). Americans, Fairbank thought, were deeply ignorant and given to half-baked and dangerous over-simplifications. China, furthermore, deserved a fair hearing.
In other words, Fairbank's predicament after 1949 was not unlike that of many Chinese of his generation who set to one side personal reservations about communism. Many of these people had been, like Fairbank, willing critics of the Nationalist regime, but went silent or became very cautious when confronted with communism. Part of the reason was simple fear of Mao's police, but that was not all. There was also a psychological dimension. Chiang Kai-shek, it was always abundantly clear, was a fallible person, and for all his being the generalissimo, one could nevertheless relate to him. Communism was different. There was something about the scale and seeming totality of its claims and of Mao's triumph that overawed and silenced people who had been ready critics of the human-scale Chiang. The apparent achievements of the regime after 1949 seemed furthermore to validate the revolution. So Chinese of Fairbank's generation learned to ask, not what was wrong with the revolution, but rather what was wrong with them that made them doubt it. I suspect Fairbank's reaction was similar.
Fairbank's response to the 1980s has likewise paralleled that of his Chinese contemporaries. For many of them the Tienanmen massacre was the last straw. They were people of good education and high ideals, who had labored selflessly to build a better China as campaign chased political campaign. They faithfully held on to shreds of the dream. The June bloodshed in Peking, however, pushed them across the line, disillusioning them decisively, and unstopping emotional passions that the awesome reality of communism had subdued since the1950s.
Those who have friends among Chinese of Fairbank's generation and those: slightly younger, will recognize the pattern: how after Tienanmen, particularly when they discussed their own lives and China's present and future, they became intellectually passionate in an unfamiliar way—as they were in their youths, per haps, with fire in their eyes and vigor and assurance in their voices, uttering sentiments long suppressed and forbidden, and imagining once again a democratic future for China. For a whole section of the Chinese intelligentsia, coping with Tienanmen was a catharsis, in which, at last, the old were able to stop denying, and to embrace wholeheartedly once again the idealism of their youth.
Now nothing might seem further removed from all that than the smooth and complete success of Fairbank's academic career. Yet in fact he was more like his Chinese peers than might be imagined. Like them, he had been an idealist. In the 1930s and 1940s he had invested a lot of emotion in his hopes for a better China. What followed in 1949 was not what he or they expected; like many of them he tried to persuade himself that it was nevertheless what he had hoped for. But he ultimately rebelled at the task. When leaves fall, the Chinese saying has it, they return to their roots. At the end of his life, Fairbank veered strongly toward the ideals of his youth. What seems to be new in China: A New History is in fact an attitude and an approach that brings him close to the liberalism with which he began in the 1930s, before History forced him, as it did China, on a long detour. —Arthur Waldron teaches East Asian studies at Brown University.