State of Mankind

Lessons in History: How a China Scholar Misread the Chinese Communist Party Twice

Jan. 2, 2021 | By Qin Chuan

(Minghui.org) “The Farmer and the Snake” is one of Aesop’s well-known fables. One winter, a farmer took pity on a frozen snake and revived it. Regaining its strength, the snake bit the man, who said just before he died, “Learn from my fate not to take pity on a scoundrel.”

The fable is easy for even a child to understand. But in today’s complex society, telling good from bad may not be so simple. The late John K. Fairbank, a renowned China scholar from Harvard, learned the true colors of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the hard way.


Two Instances of Support and Two Regrets


Even when he visited China in May 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution that claimed the life of his best friend Liang Sicheng, Fairbank still did not give up hope for the regime. U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit to China was a sign that communism was “doing better,” unlike things that occurred in the 1950s, he wrote to a friend in the following year.

It was not until Jean Pasqualini published Prisoner of Mao, in which he described his seven blood-and-terror-filled years in prison in China that Fairbank changed his attitude. “Over the years, Mao's police have perfected their interrogation methods to such a fine point that I would defy any man, Chinese or not, to hold out against them,” Pasqualini wrote in his book. “Their aim is not so much to make you invent nonexistent crimes, but to make you accept your ordinary life, as you led it, as rotten and sinful and worthy of punishment.”

After Fairbank wrote a review for the book in November 1973, however, the CCP viewed that as hostile and refused to issue him a visa when he planned to visit China again. Still, Fairbank praised Mao Zedong in May 1975, referring to him, as always, as the greatest liberator. What he did not know was that Mao had caused the deaths of tens of millions in the Great Leap Forward and other political movements.

When China and the U.S. established formal diplomatic relations and a smiling Deng Xiaoping visited the U.S. in 1979, Fairbank reverted to his earlier attitude, beginning to praise China for its democratic trend.

It was the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 that finally awakened Fairbank and other China scholars like him. Several days before he died in 1991, he was able to finish China: A New History in which he corrected his erroneous opinions about the CCP. “Without the devastating Japanese invasion, the Nanjing government might gradually have led the way in China’s modernization,” he wrote in the book. “As it turned out, however, resisting Japan gave Mao and the CCP their chance to establish a new autocratic power in the countryside, excluding the elements of a nascent urban civil society that were still developing under the Nationalists.”

He also mentioned the brutal suppression of the democratic movement on Tiananmen Square at least 10 times. “...the violent military crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, in which it is estimated that anywhere from 800 to 1,300 people lost their lives and 10,000 to 30,000 participants were imprisoned,” he wrote.

He also pointed to the tragedies of the political movements such as the Great Leap Forward. “...the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath, in which more than 30 million peasants died from famine and malnutrition, and the Cultural Revolution, in which half a million people were killed or committed suicide and an estimated 100 million were persecuted,” he wrote.

He emphasized, “Chairman Mao Zedong killed millions and millions of Chinese while calling it a class struggle for revolution.”

Still, given his influence as an educator, scholar, and government advisor, Fairbank played a critical role in shaping U.S. strategy in favor of the CCP, both during the civil war in the 1940s and in connecting the countries in the 1970s. In his book, United States and China, he praised Mao above other leaders in history, from Caesar and Napoleon to Lenin. This book, written in 1948 and revised in 1958, 1971, and 1983, was one of the few books Nixon considered authoritative before he visited China in February 1972.

So how did Fairbank get the CCP wrong twice?


Judging a Book by Its Cover


John Fairbank, whose Chinese name is Fei Zhengqing

Fairbank was born in 1907. After graduating from Harvard in 1929, he went to Oxford to study the Chinese language and history. After arriving in Beijing in 1932, he studied at Tsinghua University, where he met Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Huiyin, two founders of modern Chinese architecture. Back at Oxford, Fairbank focused on the history of the Qing Dynasty, and Liang’s father was considered a distinguished reformer of the Qing Government.

Fairbank returned to Harvard in 1936 to teach Chinese history. He was later recruited to work for the U.S. government, which dispatched him to China in September 1942 for 15 months. His next assignment took him back to China in October 1945 for nine months. Visiting the CCP-held territory of Zhang Jiakou in June 1946, he was presented with CCP propaganda, such as “...we declared that, first, China needs peace and, second, China needs democracy,” as Mao wrote in October 1945.

With sincere respect for Chinese history and culture, Fairbank accepted the CCP at face value, with no way of that knowing the CCP would toss out these flowery remarks after seizing power several years later. Presented with only one side of the story, he did not know how the CCP regime had ruthlessly destroyed countless landlords—financially, physically, and mentally—in the name of “class struggle.” As a result, he encouraged the U.S. to work with Mao instead of Chiang Kai-shek and introduced the CCP to the United Nations.

Although the Korean war taught Fairbank the harm of communism and the political movement against intellectuals showed him the regime’s cruelty, he still had hope for the CCP. “Our reaction to Chinese Communism is naturally surcharged with resentment,” he wrote in The Atlantic in April 1957, “Our present posture toward China is righteous, isolated, and negative.”

Considered a China expert, Fairbank not only taught students and established the Center for East Asian Research in 1955 (later renamed The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies), he also served as an advisor for the U.S. Embassy in China and U.S. government agencies. Because of his pro-communist opinions, he was denied a visa to visit Japan and was called to testify before the McCarran Committee. Nonetheless, his fame and status at Harvard protected him, enabling him to write articles in favor of the CCP.

Similar to Fairbank, what Nixon saw when he visited China in 1972 was also staged, “including the propaganda machine, the security apparatus and efforts to mobilise the masses,” reported the BBC in a June 2018 article titled, “‘The week that changed the world’: How China prepared for Nixon.” For example, children were taught how to answer questions such as “Do you have enough to eat and wear?” and “Do you like America?” correctly.

“Truckloads of supplies were ferried to shops to fill the shelves, with a wider variety of goods on offer than usual,” the article continued, adding that even “tourists” on the Great Wall were “10 politically reliable people” previously picked with training on how to respond, according to a witness. “Much of the interaction between the Nixon party and “normal” Chinese people also appeared to be staged by Beijing,” concluded the BBC report.


Friends’ Tragedies and Final Clarity


Aside from Pasqualini’s Prisoner of Mao, there could have been other factors, such as the tragedies of his friends, that led to Fairbank to rethink the CCP in 1973.

As mentioned above, Fairbank met the Liang couple at Tsinghua University in 1932 and befriended them. His Chinese name, Fei Zhengqing, was actually given to him by the Liang couple. Liang and his wife had both studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where Liang earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in architecture, and his wife a bachelor’s degree in art. After the couple returned to China in 1928, although Lin was already ill, they managed to evaluate over 2,000 ancient structures in more than 200 counties in China within several years, making a significant contribution to the study of ancient Chinese structures. When the Allies planned heavy bombing of Japan in World War II, Liang successfully convinced America to spare the Japanese cities of Kyoto and Nara. He was hailed a hero in protecting ancient structures during the war.

In December 1948, Chiang Kai-shek sent planes to Beijing to bring renowned scholars to Taiwan. Both Liang and his wife were on the list, but they refused to leave due to their confidence in the CCP. It was too late when they learned that Mao had decided to demolish the majority of ancient structures in Beijing in 1953, claiming they were symbols of feudalism. The couple was grief-stricken when the buildings were destroyed one by one. Lin died two years later. Liang, on the other hand, was tortured and humiliated countless times before he finally passed away in January 1972.

Liang was not alone, as Fairbank’s other Chinese friends who stayed in mainland China also had similar experiences. Sociologist Fei Xiaotong was attacked between 1957 and 1980, Legal expert Ch'ien Tuan-sheng earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1924 and was attacked after 1957,

It remains unclear whether Fairbank knew all this back then. Nonetheless, his awakening in 1973 did not last long and he became a CCP supporter after Deng Xiaoping visited the U.S. in 1979.



(to be continued in next post)