Word: fairbanks
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...spring of 1929, while Mao Tse-tung pushed the Red Army through village after dirty village in southern Kiangsi, a few Harvard seniors sat down in the genteel dining room of the Signet Society. John Fairbank, lanky and round-headed, was among them. He listened carefully to Charles Kingsley Webster, a visiting professor from Oxford, as the garrulous old man suggested that someone become interested in sorting out the Chinese documents pouring into the West...
...Fairbank, 21, already had quite a reputation. He had been valedictorian at Exeter and was writing an excellent thesis, later awarded a summa, on the Russian revolution. He had come from South Dakota ("from the provinces," as he later described it) and when he spoke that afternoon the words came painstakingly slow and were full of unscholarly American idioms...
...Fairbank has been a critic of the government's China policy. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last March, he favored the admission of Communist China to the U.N., and argued that United States policy should aim at "getting the Peking leadership into the international order...
...willingness of the U.S. government to grant passports to American scholars and journalists who wish to travel to mainland China, and other U.S. moves to widen communications with the Chinese, have elicited no answer whatsoever from Peking, Fairbank said...
...Apparently they're much too busy to even think about their position abroad," Fairbank speculated. "Their whole foreign policy has been delayed by the confusion in Peking, and this might be a good time to fix things up on our end. The State Department panel could thus be helpful...