Word: fairbanks
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...recurring themes in John K. Fairbank's work is the American perception of China. Since 1784, when the first American merchant ship sent to Canton returned with spices, silk, and a 25-per-cent profit, that perception has resulted in Americans' continual fascination with the vast, rich, mysterious nation. That same perception also launched many later ships laden not with goods to trade but with missionaries determined to remake the Chinese in their own image. We have never been able to see China through Chinese eyes, Fairbank teaches, but only through our own. Fairbank titled one of his many books...
...perhaps not inappropriate that when it came time to write this article Fairbank was in Europe and could not be reached for an interview. The following is a profile of the China specialist seen through the eyes of his friends and colleagues. Diane Sherlock...
...tiny white community among Asians, had never understood. The second reason was that the scholars had been in the Far East, as it was then called, during the war, either in Japan for the American occupation or even, in rare cases, in China. The third reason was John King Fairbank...
...Before Fairbank there was a darkness about Asia. Every course ended in 1793 with the death of the emperor Ch'ien-lung. Everything else was journalism," says Theodore H. White '38, the author of The Making of the President books and Thunder Out of China, who was Fairbank's first undergraduate tutee. Fairbank, who is retiring this year as Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History after 41 years on the Faculty, led the way out of that darkness, making modern China part of the American intellectual world. With a single-minded devotion that America's China missionaries would have envied...
...Fairbank's success far outshines that of America's China missionaries (the number of Chinese Christian converts was always embarrassingly small) then it may perhaps be attributed to Faribank's capacity to understand his pupils, a capacity that the missionaries lacked. It is not only because Fairbank's books are so widely read that David E. Kelley, a current graduate student in East Asian studies, says of the professor, "It's hard to see where his personal perspective ends and his influence on others begins." And James C. Thomson Jr., curator of the Nieman Foundation who wrote his doctoral dissertation...