Fairbank Discusses Crisis of Chinese Universities as Book Drive Starts

Opportunity for Harvard to make clear its position in the Sino-Japanese War and take a real step in furthering international scholarship was outlined by John K. Fairbank '29, instructor in History, as he discussed the drive for books and funds to support China's fleeing universities starting this week.

Driven from Peiping by the invading army, the universities have clung together and established themselves practically intact in Kunming, 2000 miles south and in the inland of China. There living as they can, students and professors many of whom have walked all the way from Peiping, are attempting to maintain a center of Chinese learning in open air classes.

Intelligentsia

Fairbank particularly emphasized the function of the intelligentsia in the Chinese social and political system. It is the college graduates who organize and direct all efforts to oppose the Japanese. It is in the colleges that Chinese nationalism is chiefly fostered, and hence it is at the universities that the Japanese have directed their first attacks. Through the preservation of the universities alone does China stand a real chance to throw off the Japanese yoke and salvage her own culture and independence.

Only by the most courageous and spectacular fortitude, Fairbank continued, have the universities been able to keep from disintegrating. Their books and buildings have been taken from them, and now in Kunming their preservation depends on aid from foreign nations. "It is our chance now to take up the cause of international scholarship and stand against the wanton imperialism of an aggressor nation."

Text Books to be Collected

Since text books are the primary need of the universities, the plan is to make a collection of old standard works to be sent free of charge through the Smithsonian Institute which is organizing the drive throughout the country. The center of collection will be the east side door of Widener, but the committee of House representatives appointed by Phillips Brooks House will also aid collecting.