China Pundit
Fairbank, John K.
China Pundit CHINABOUND by John K. Fairbank Harper & Row. 480 pp. $20. John King Fairbank writes in this fascinating memoir that China was for him what the gospel had been for his Congregational...
...He hasn't lost his, thankfully, and while he and his students are around, the republic may still have a chance...
...He tells of friend John Keswick's What I Know about China, which went into several printings and to which Fairbank over the years contributed illustrative material and appendices...
...He jokes that old deans never die, they just lose their faculties...
...Chinabound can be faulted on several grounds...
...To advance the cause of China research, Fairbank took the approach from the first of getting the historiography down pat, amassing sources, and cataloging those scholars working in the vineyard...
...He thought that Tai Li, the Kuomintang's infamous spy chief, certainly was more handsome than J. Edgar Hoover...
...trees, dogs, and other atmospherics are absent...
...Fairbank's people are politician's, movers, and dissenters...
...His big research regrets were an inability to get Harvard into the Vietnam picture before it became a problem and to make much headway in research on Sino-Russian relations...
...The messianic urge, however, didn't come until he was immersed in a lifelong study that by dint of an early start, high intelligence, and dogged attention to detail has made him dean of our China scholars...
...Some people he heard about went into Chinese language training and were never heard of again...
...In China he learned the language (more an affliction than a language) and later added Japanese to his toolbox...
...In the light of the moon, in the sunshine at noon, /1 savored the fragrance of flowers, / Not to speak of the slush, or the muck and the mush) That covers the streets and alleys...
...His book doesn't have the depth and style of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1938), George Kates's The Years That Were Fat (1952), or Jonathan Spence's The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1981...
...John King Fairbank writes in this fascinating memoir that China was for him what the gospel had been for his Congregational minister grandfather: a way to make a living while saving the world...
...Many are clever, some intelligent, a few wise (but none is on a par with the ancient counselor who advised against gunpowder because it singed beards, burned houses, and brought Taoism into disrepute...
...Robert W. Smith (Robert W. Smith worked in China research for the CIA for almost twenty-five years and is now a Washington writer and critic...
...Early on he showed interest in the then arcane field of Chinese history...
...For his advocacy of a normal acceptance of political opposition instead of a KMT dictatorship and for predicting Chiang Kai-shek's defeat, Fairbank along with the best of our China hands of the 1940s was caught in the subsequent McCarthy paranoia...
...But because he had never had a policy role, when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary (McCarran) Committee he emerged unscathed (thanks also to the support of friends such as Elmer Davis, the Walter Cronkite of that day, who shouted across the room the day of the hearing, "John, can you eat with us tonight...
...His outspoken views continued to bother many, and by 1977 he had the distinction of being in bad odor in both Peking and Taipei because of his denunciation of Communist and Nationalist repression...
...Fairbank came east from South Dakota to study at Harvard and then Oxford...
...Nor did he like former Ambassador Pat Hurley, who "with supine Stettinius of U.S...
...there is so much of Fairbank that one can readily find chinks in his armor...
...Fairbank ends his fine book by castigating the United States' reliance on arms over rationality, but he hopes that humanists working together can help this spiteful and divided world to survive...
...His picture of wartime Chungking, the pits of creation, is an exception, however, reminiscent of General Joe Stilwell's poem, "A Lyric to Spring": "I welcomed the spring in romantic Chungking / I walked in her beautiful bowers...
...Or the reek of the swill, as it seeps down the hill, / —or the odor of pig in the valleys...
...His vignettes of that modern Voltaire, Hu Shih, and of Owen Lattimore, Agnes Smedley, Theodore White, and the Edgar Snows are excellent, but by book's end end we know too much of practically every China watcher since World War II...
...I view such defects more as lapses in writing than in the man...
...His humor more than compensates...
...His picture of China is largely of people who fit his research criteria...
...Steel as Secretary of State" overruled his staff and put the United States squarely behind Chiang in 1945, a move that forfeited our flexibility, added to our Manichean Cold War ideology, and led to a communist China very different from what it might have been...
...The book's pages, of course, were blank...
...After a conversation with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Fairbank concluded she was trying hard to be a great lady with conversation too cosmic to be real...
...Thereafter, alternating China stays with Harvard teaching, he continued to absorb and communicate China to thousands...
...In appreciation, Harvard renamed its East Asian Studies Center in his honor in 1977...
...He got started too late to make a dent in Russian...
...A stint in China in 1932-1935 turned the interest into a passion...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
