Volume 35, Number 2 · February 18, 1988
China on My Mind
By Jonathan D. Spence
China Watch
by John King Fairbank
Harvard University Press, 219 pp., $20.00
The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800–1985
by John King Fairbank
Harper and Row, 396 pp., $6.50 (paper)
Almost forty years have passed since John King Fairbank's first book, The United States and China, was published in 1948. A careful blending of Chinese institutional history with diplomatic history, the book proved immediately popular among Americans seeking to place their present against the background of China's past. Over the next six years, as the Communists consolidated their hold over China and the Korean War effectively wrecked US-China relations, Mr. Fairbank established his reputation as the leading expert on China in the United States, producing the astonishing number of five further books within that short period. One was a major bibliographical guide to recent Chinese historical writing; another, a meticulously translated and annotated collection of documents on the Chinese Communist party's rise to power. One, particularly useful for graduate students, was an analytical teaching manual on how to decipher and translate Chinese historical texts. Another was an important monograph published in two volumes, based on Fairbank's earlier Oxford Ph.D. dissertation, on the formation of the foreign powers' favored 'Treaty Ports' on the Chinese coastline between 1842 and 1854.
Review, 3538 words
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