John King Fairbank

His paternal grandfather, John Barnard Fairbank, was "from the long 'J.B.' line, mainly of Congregational ministers, which stemmed from the Fairbank family that came to Massachusetts in 1633 [and] graduated... from Union Theological Seminary, New York, in 1860."

John K. Fairbank was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol).

As an undergraduate, he was advised by Charles Kingsley Webster, the distinguished British diplomatic historian who was then teaching at Harvard, to choose a relatively-undeveloped field of study.

Webster suggested that since the Qing dynasty's archives were then being opened, China's foreign relations would be a prudent choice.

Fairbank later admitted that he then knew nothing about China itself.

His father was Arthur Boyce Fairbank (1873–1936), a lawyer, and his mother was Lorena King Fairbank (1874–1979), who campaigned for women's suffrage.

John King Fairbank (May 24, 1907 – September 14, 1991) was an American historian of China and United States–China relations.

Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota, in 1907.

In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

At Oxford, Fairbank began his study of the Chinese language and sought the counsel of H.B. Morse, retired from the Imperial Maritime Customs Service.

On Webster's advice, he had read Morse's three-volume study of the Qing dynasty's foreign relations on the ship that was coming to England.

Morse became his mentor.

The ambitious young scholar decided to go to Beijing to do research in December 1931 and arrived in China in January 1932.

In Beijing, he studied at Tsinghua University under the direction of the prominent historian Tsiang Tingfu, who introduced him to the study of newly available diplomatic sources and the perspectives of Chinese scholarship, which balanced the British approaches he saw at Oxford.

Wilma Denio Cannon, a daughter of Walter Bradford Cannon and sister of Marian Cannon Schlesinger, came to China in 1932 to join Fairbank.

They were married on June 29, 1932.

Wilma had studied fine arts at Radcliffe College and had been an apprentice to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera before she traveled to China.

She began a career of her own in Chinese art history.

John and Wilma came to know a number of Chinese intellectuals.

They became especially warm friends with Liang Sicheng, the son of the distinguished Chinese reformer Liang Qichao, and his wife, Lin Huiyin, whom they called Phyllis.

The Lins introduced them to Jin Yuelin, a philosopher and originally a political scientist trained at Columbia University.

Fairbank wrote later that he and Wilma began to sense through them that the Chinese problem was the "necessity to winnow the past and discriminate among things foreign, what to preserve and what to borrow...."

He taught at Harvard University from 1936 until his retirement in 1977.

He is credited with building the field of Sinology in the United States after World War II with his organizational ability, his mentorship of students, support of fellow scholars, and formulation of basic concepts to be tested.

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard is named after him.

In 1936, Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. for his thesis, which he revised using further research and eventually published as Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 in 1953.

Fairbank returned to Harvard in 1936 to take up a position teaching Chinese history and was its first full-time specialist at Harvard.

In 1941 he and Edwin O. Reischauer worked out a year-long introductory survey covering China and Japan, later adding Korea and Southeast Asia.

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Fairbank was enlisted for service in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and the Office of War Information in Chongqing, the temporary capital of Nationalist China.

When he returned to Harvard after the war, Fairbank inaugurated a master's degree program in area studies, one of several major universities in the United States to do so.

That approach at Harvard was multi-disciplinary and aimed to train journalists, government officials, and others who did not want careers in academia.

Among his most widely read books are The United States and China, first published in 1948 and revised editions in 1958, 1979, and 1983; East Asia: The Great Tradition (1960) and East Asia The Great Transformation (1965), co-authored with Edwin O. Reischauer; and his co-edited series, The Cambridge History of China.

That broad approach, combined with Fairbank's experience in China during the war, shaped his United States and China (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Foreign Policy Library, 1948).

One of his students, Paul Cohen, noted that the approaches or stages in the development of China studies of the 1950s are sometimes referred to as "the Harvard 'school' of China studies."

He also published an expanded revision of his doctoral dissertation as Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast in 1953.

That survey went through new editions in 1958 and 1970, each synthesizing scholarship in the field for both students and the general public.

The course was known as "Rice Paddies," and it became the basis for two influential texts: East Asia: The Great Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and East Asia: The Modern Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).

In 1972, in preparation for Nixon's visit, the book was read by leaders on both sides.

Fairbank taught at Harvard until he retired in 1977.

He published a number of both academic and non-academic works on China, many of which would reach a wide audience outside academia.