China Plain

China: A New History.
by John King Fairbank.
Harvard University Press. 519 pp. $27.95.

China in Our Time.
by Ross Terrill.
Simon & Schuster. 366 pp. $25.00.

John King Fairbank, long-time professor of history at Harvard, was the single most important figure in the development of China studies in this country. Born in South Dakota, he prepped at Exeter, was graduated from Harvard, and, as a Rhodes Scholar, went to China in 1932 as part of his doctoral studies at Oxford. Beyond his many writings, he was an organizer, fundraiser, and association founder. He completed China: A New History in 1991, just before his death at age eighty-four. For Fair-bank to think, at that stage of his life, that China was in need of a new history suggests how the scholarly discipline he helped create had changed over the past 50 years and, especially, over the past five.

What is “new” in this survey of China’s history from ancient times to the present is, in the best Chinese fashion, more implied than stated, more suggestive than definitive, more methodological than conclusive. The sheer bulk of the work, its large reliance on the specialized and the technical, and its relaxed, non-dogmatic tone add up to a freeing of the subject from contentious political and policy debates. It is the work of a contented historian.

Yet, in truth, this also makes for a rather unexciting history, for there is no great epic here, nor a great moral of the story. Fairbank’s new history, concerned with the deep structure of Chinese society, is not particularly venturesome, and has surprisingly little to say about art, literature, and the culture generally. Rather, the building blocks of the book are the many monographs produced over the years under the aegis of Harvard’s East Asian Center, which Fairbank founded and then headed for many years. Fairbank gives these works great prominence, and commends them for the persistence and professionalism they embody. It is a form of praise for his students and their products and an acknowledgment that his last book should be understood as a personal monument of a kind, containing within it the outline for the posthumous Festschrift which will certainly follow.

Twenty years ago, Fairbank had stated the representative conclusion of the old history so far as contemporary Chinese affairs were concerned. “The Maoist revolution,” he wrote then, “is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in centuries.” In his new history, he explicitly repudiates this statement, calling it an outstanding example of what he terms “sentimental Sinophilia,” the

occupational quirk of Sinologists, a secondary patriotism or Sinophilia that may lead otherwise hard-headed scholars to want to say no evil of the object of their researches.

But there is more to it, of course, than mere sentiment. Sinologists of Fairbank’s generation, who had observed firsthand the wretched circumstances of the country in the 1940’s, before and during World War II, welcomed radical social change. Then, as relations between Communist China and the United States deteriorated, full-scale war—beyond the bloody fighting in Korea—was an ever-present possibility; China’s revolution had therefore to be portrayed as unthreatening, despite abundant contrary evidence.

_____________

 

For the next generation, the depiction of China was bound up in the Vietnam war, since American intervention had been based in part on the prospect of Chinese expansionism. Hence, in the early 1970’s, “sentimental Sinophilia” was replaced by what might be called “politically-correct Sinophilia,” and the task of perpetuating the benign view of Chinese Communism was taken up by people who were motivated by a mindless leftism rather than by pity for the long-suffering Chinese people.

In this regard, the latest of the many books by the well-known “China-watcher” Ross Terrill is instructive, for the views he formed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s are in retreat as the 1990’s advance.

Australian-born, Terrill is now an American citizen with a Harvard doctorate, a product of Fair-bank’s East Asian Center. When he first went to China in 1964 his interest, he says, “was in part that of a young Christian idealist.” He has returned many times since, mostly as a political pilgrim (but certainly not the worst among them). He went on to write biographies of Mao and Mrs. Mao and much travel literature, all the while exhibiting a knack for being around while conspicuous things were happening. But his prominence as a commentator began with the opening of China occasioned by President Nixon’s visit in 1972. In writing for the general public, but especially for the edification of journalists, Terrill had near-perfect pitch; he knew enough to impress the latter as an expert, yet never burdened them with more than their fidgety quick studying would bear.

_____________

 

China in Our Time has two aspects. The first, an account of Terrill’s past involvement with the country and his role as adviser (or, more accurately, kibitzer) in the development of Sino-Western relations, is interlarded with reflections on what he now sees as his too-enthusiastic embrace of Communist China:

The excitement of discovering a truly different society made me too open-minded and the feeling of being engaged in counteracting the stupidity of the nonacknowledgment of China had made me insufficiently skeptical of the Chinese Communist party.

Later on, he explains why, during the 1965-67 murderous upheaval called the Cultural Revolution, he “was not open to accept the pathology of Mao’s actions.” Like many of his cohort, he says, he operated on a mixture of anti-Vietnam-war sentiment, Christian idealism, fear of nuclear war, and a general interest in public affairs. Here, like Fairbank in his invocation of sentiment, Terrill is more than a bit disingenuous. He too easily slides over the dogmatism and the intolerance with which the politically-correct Sinologists of those days enforced an approving attitude toward Communist China within their own profession—while thoroughly misleading the general public.

Still, he is contrite. Finding himself in Beijing during the spring of 1989, he went on to produce an outstanding account of the student uprising and its repression. He not only reports on the events, he seems edified by them.1 Indeed, upon reflection, he acknowledges that the academic certainties of China studies, especially the assumption about the continued presence of Communism in China, are now up for grabs.

_____________

 

Because the Chinese are themselves engaged in open argument about their future and their standing in the world, Western observers seem equally free to see China as a real country once again, not merely the site of mind-numbing jargon and bizarre intrigue. It is this new sense of things which allows Fairbank to speculate on the development of “civil society” in China, and which prods Terrill to suggest that we “avoid double standards” in assessing Chinese behavior, that we look at China “not only in its contemporary form but down the long corridor of the centuries.”

Such open-mindedness could well produce new and useful insights into China. Western scholars may now, at last, be willing to help us see more of what is there and what has been there than they did when almost all of them felt obliged to accept the necessity and even the desirability of Beijing’s domestic and foreign policies.

1 Terrill has also become personally involved: in September he was expelled from China for having acted as an adviser to Shen Tong, a leader of the student movement who had returned to China and was arrested as he was preparing to meet with foreign journalists.

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link