John K. Fairbank
Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
1997
Essay
Oct
1972
Foreigners approaching a North China village in the early 1930s met the barking of ill-fed dogs and the stares of children covered with flies. Villagers had skin and scalp sores due to poor nutrition. Their inbred civility was that of peasants who were conscious of the guest-host relationship but ignorant of the outer world. Typically their strips of dusty farmland had few trees and little water, which only came out of wells laboriously, bucket by bucket. The long years of Japanese invasion and Nationalist-Communist civil war down to 1949 brought no improvement in this essentially medieval situation.
Essay
Apr
1969
The American breakthrough in studies of Communist China during the last decade, despite all the difficulties of study from a distance, has given us a new capacity to appraise Peking's shifts of current policy. At the same time, our very success in understanding short-term developments tends to foreshorten our perspective, as though Chairman Mao's new China were actually as new as he so fervently exhorts it to be. If we ask the long- term question-What is China's tradition in foreign policy?-our query may provoke two counter-questions: Did the Chinese empire ever have a conscious foreign policy? Even if it did, hasn't Mao's revolution wiped out any surviving tradition?
Essay
Jul
1966
"Communist China"-how far Communist? How far Chinese? And what is the difference anyway? How are we to evaluate the impact that decades of war and violence and revolutionary zeal have had upon the China of today? Do Peking's leaders use the terminology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism but express sentiments inherited from the Middle Kingdom? Are they unconsciously in the grip of their past, even when most explicitly condemning it? Certainly there is a resonance between China today and earlier periods. But how great is the actual continuity?
