Word: fairbank
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...JOHN K. FAIRBANK...
Nobody in the West has done more to clear up the mystery of China than John K. Fairbank, professor of Chinese history at Harvard. His latest book, a collection of 17 essays written between 1946 and 1974, continues a lifetime of combat against what he calls "the original sin of ignorance" about East Asia. It is a sin, Fairbank feels, that can be resisted only with the help of a great deal more historical knowledge than most Americans now possess. The various pieces in the book are unified by the author's persistent attempt to show that the present...
...Fairbank begins with a stunningly impressive analysis, written in 1946, on the prospects for democracy in China at that time. They were nil, he concluded, not only because the Communists were more vigorous and popular than the American-backed Kuomintang, but also because "the inertia of tradition" did not permit Western-style solutions in China. Fairbank was of course right, and since that essay-as textbook writer, as target of the McCarthy campaign, as a mover and shaker in the field of Asian studies in the U.S.-he has stuck to his main theme. The great Confucian system of government...
...Fairbank argues that China has not freed itself from this Confucian past, despite Mao Tse-tung's revolution. Like the China of old, the People's Republic is still "massive, profoundly collectivist, and professedly anti-individualist." Important habits of the Confucian tradition have been modified: rule by an imperial figure still persists, for example, and so does adherence to ideological orthodoxy, whether Confucian or Communist. Ironically, the methods used to overthrow the old system are reminiscent of past methods. The Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution had their prototypes in the antiforeign Boxers of the 19th century...
...moved along. Even correcting public misinformation seems of slight concern to Harvard faculty. Do the millions in Middle America misunderstand the nature of Communism, or the recent history of the Communist nations? They might correct their views if they get a chance to hear an authority like John Fairbank at a televised Senate hearing, as they did in the midst of the Vietnamese War; but in general, there seems to be little opportunity or desire among Harvard scholars to stoop to the business of popularizing in order to correct public misinformation, or even to find out in any detail what...