JOHN K. FAIRBANK He Uses A Certain Perspective To Explain A Turbulent China

In the 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.

He appreciated what Webster was saying. Historians of the day ignored modern China. Chiang Kai-shek was organizing a huge, bloody trap to "exterminate" thousands of Communists, but the first American journalists wouldn't arrive on the scene for another few years. Sometime between that luncheon and his arrival at Oxford months later as a Rhodes Scholar, Fairbank decided that Chinese history might be an interesting thing to try. He borrowed a book from the ex-missionary who taught Chinese at Oxford, sat down and began to memorize the characters. Thirty-eight years after that luncheon the ranking State Department East Asian man would invite Fairbank, as the most respected China historian in the country, to advise the U.S. Government on new trouble in Kiangsi and elsewhere. His byline would appear in seven national magazines and his lined, gently smirking face would peer out from the T.V. screen on two networks.

The China Fairbank had to explain in 1967 was considerably less comfortable for foreigners than the nation saw in 1932 when he first arrived in Peking. With $1000 the young student settled himself and his wife for three years in a large house with several servants, hired a Chinese tutor, and then, finishing his doctoral thesis, returned to the Harvard faculty. The war began and he was called back to China as a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador.

He had to collect intelligence information from the Chinese and, as was his rule, groped for the Chinese way of doing it. The way (offering the Chinese American scientific data) was quickly found, and as quickly explained years later in his favorite brusque Americanese: "I got in contact with Chinese intellectuals. You can't go to China and get something without anything to give. You can't go and say 'gimme, gimme.' If you have something to give, that's OK, that's polite." It wasn't always in the line of duty. When the Nationalists began to crack down on a number of their intellectuals critics in Kunming, Fairbank headed south to help the scholars.

His search for the Chinese way of doing things occasionally got the better of him. John Carter Vincent, then number two man in the American embassy, remembers visiting Fairbank and finding him "living like a Chinese in a cold, barren office trying to keep warm in a padded Chinese gown. He was in such a bad state with a cold that I brought him back to the embassy and had him stay there until he got over it."

Fairbank doesn't like to waste time with colds, or anything else. He has been found in the morning shaving with one hand while reading a book in the other, or at graduate semniars, clipping his nails while reports are read. He religiously dictates everything he writes. Edwin Reischauer, University Professor and a time conservationist of lesser repute, recently suggested they skip lunch to meet and plan a course. "But you have to eat," replied Fairbank. Reischauer looked skeptical. Fairbank continued, "If we don't eat then, we'll have to use up some time before or after our meeting."

After war, Fairbank returned to Harvard to gather together a few ex-G.I.'s from the Pacific theater as students and make the small beginning in Asian regional studies. "Our motto was 'Quo Vadis,' Benjamin Schwartz, now professor of History and Government one of the ex-G.I.'s, says, "It was a risky venture. Before World War II the study of China was considered a risky enterprise. His (Fairbank's) hope at that time was that most of us would go into government." But instead they spread out to other universities, in fifteen years populating most of the China research centers in the U.S.

Fairbank proceeded to build Asian studies with habitual restlessness. According to legend, he rarely went to parties unless something useful was going to come of it. One professor remembers a Christmas party for the students and professors in China regional studies held at a Chinese restaurant. Everyone was enjoying themselves until Fairbank stood up, put a huge briefcase on the table, and said something like: "We are having a good time, but it would be a shame, with us together here, if we missed the opportunity to discuss some of our current problems and goals. Where exactly is regional studies going?" Everyone's face sank as Fairbank reached into the briefcase, apparently to answer his own question with some long, prepared remarks.

Our instead came a long white beard, which Fairbank put on, and then, his colleague says, he proceeded to deliver a speech couched in academic terms of the day but placed in such a context that "it was one of the bawdiest speeches I've heard in my life."

The sense of humor probably helped when Fairbank's name, along with that of many other American China specialists, was thrown into the cauldron of the Internal Security Subcommittee by a few former Communist agents. The charges against him, as against most, were false but inconvenient. After traveling all the way to the West Coast, he had to cancel a sabbatical to Japan when the American occupation army refused to clear him for entry. With some difficulty he was granted a hearing before the Senate subcommittee on Internal Security. Mindful of others who had waked in trusting only their own innocence, Fairbank crammed for the hearing as if it were an exam: "You realized how little you knew about yourself. Do you know where you were in August 1916? What were you doing there?"

Fairbank emerged unbruised, partially because Harvard supported him. On the other hand, many of his friends, Vincent and Owen Lattimore among them, were left with severely damaged careers. Public discussion of China was also hurt. "T.V. was laying off," he says, "The country was sick of it. It was an uncomfortable subject."

That subject had been the conscientious concern of several young, Americans during the '30's and '40's. They steeped themselves in China's history and culture. In the process, they could not avoid being affected by the constant bloodletting and corruption on the Nationalist side, and the bright hope of the young frank communists. People came back from the communist stronghold at Yenan, Fairbank remembers, "incandescent" with praise for the ideas and humanity of Mao and his young friends. They returned to America burdened with both the memory of frustration and a message of hope about the Communists.

They received, of course, no sympathy, only fear and suspicion. This, plus the impact of the McCarthy hearings on their careers, broke some of them. Others faded away and forgot about China for awhile.

Fairbank was apparently a little different, first because he was protected by a strong University and second because of his remarkable gift for selfcontrol. In his personal manner, and in his writing and speaking, he apparently has complete control over his emotions. They never intrude into the bright, short sentences. This could be the product of years of iron selfdiscipline and scholarly commitment, but Fairbank seems to possess a more natural gift--perspective. Behind that curious, expressionless face lies a con-