A Re-compilation of Old Postings

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/11520-john-fairbanks-view-on-communist-china/

 

It is a daunting task to get rid of John Fairbank’s shadow over the China studies. Only after John Fairbank is exposed will there be a subjective assessment.

John Fairbank was one member of the Office of Strategic Services in 1940s. The OSS had been a hotbed of Soviet agents and the American CP from the very beginning.

Though John Fairbank had his very cold trail, and had kept distance from the agents exposed by the VENONA wiretaps or Soviet archives, we could still see who Fairbank was, circumventially. I could not tell when Fairbank had been bought over by the “liberals”, i.e, the Russians, or the Comintern or CCP. He stayed in Peking, China from 1932 to 1937. A lot of people had transformed while staying in China, including Smedley who claimed in 1927 that she was late for the Russian revolution but just on time for the Chinese one. Stilwell and Marshall stayed in China at about the same timeframe. And, Lattimore, as well.

Fairbank’s liaison with Owen Lattimore and other American communists had enough to say about himself. Remember Alger Hiss who, till his death, refused to acknowledge himself to be a member of the American CP. Lattimore, by his deathbed, had some repentancy words about two Chinese assistants, saying he did not know till 1980s-90s that they were CP agents. Lattimore’s son, in 2000, still believed that America could have a chance to be a friend of the CCP in 1949-1950, before the eruption of the Korean War, which was the same view shared by Fairbank.

The ladder for Fairbank and Lattimore was very similar. Some hidden hands had sponsored the two guys up the social pyramid after ascertaining the usefulness of the two guys. Whittaker Chambers had good recollections of how the American CP worked in the U.S., which was simialr to what the CCP had done to college students on the campus, i.e., enrolling the “progressive” students in front organizations. After half a century, Fairbank became so important a figure in the American academics that Arthur Young, who had more qualifications to talk about China [after serving China from 1929 to 1947], would have to ask for Fairbank’s opinions before publishing his book. –Incidentally, I read his Cambrdige History on Republican China. My impression was that it was merely a copycat of China’s New China News Agency catalog.

What Fairbank did not reflect was how the U.S. deliberately choked Chiang Kai-shek throughout the resistance war after voluntarily giving a loan at the time of the launch of Wang Jingwei’s puppet government in March-April 1940, just to make sure that China stayed in the war in lieu of a compromise with Japan which already had a scheme to halve China with the USSR months before the eruption of the Pacific War. And, what is more egregious was that it is now very much proven that Stilwell did have Roosevelt’s authorization to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek sometime in 1944. And, the Yalta Betrayal was not a product of some old man who had a hearing disability, but a deliberate appeasement to Stalin in the context of the Soviets’ hijacking the United States government.

I had grabbed the book on the Arizona conference. Stephen R. Mackinnon and Oris Friesen, in China Reporting, pointed out what John Faibank had confessed in the 1980s as one of the weaknesses of American reporters in then China, namely, they did not speak Chinese and never got a chance to access a Chinese peasant to observe what the communist revolution was like in the countryside. Stephen R. Mackinnon and Oris Friesen, like John Faibank, probably never knew that the communists had a system of using kids or the so-called ‘young pioneers’ as sentry to the extent that no stranger could have slipped into the communist-held territory without detection. So, whatever excuse made up by Stephen R. Mackinnon and Oris Friesen or John Fairbank, did not and does not stand. Only what they said and what they did count, and it was to sabotage the Nationalist China, not necessarily on behalf of the Russians, as Owen Lattimore was more identified as an agent of the CCP than that of the Russians (i.e., the Soviets): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Lattimore

To know how Fairbank and the Old China Hands had formulated their thoughts on China, I had tried to be in their shoes from the moment of 1927. At about the same time, in 1928, CPUSA founder Browder and his lover Kitty Harris went to China and lived together in Shanghai where they worked together on behalf of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a Comintern organization engaged in the clandestine labor organizing. The foremost thing to remember is that Comintern agents had loyalty for Russia and the ideology, not to the motherland, no matter the CPUSA to America or the CCP to China.

Your last post had a conflict with what you claimed in previous post as to your understanding of Fairbank as far as the Mandate or the choice of the Chinese people concerned. I had provided the quotes to show you that you were wrong about what you know what Fairbank had said about China. – There is no score gained or lost here whether you were proven wrong or me wrong, by the way.

Ever since VENONA and the Russian archive declassification, the credibility for whatever Fairbank defended was gone completely. The professors you have in those American colleges and universities had problem reconciling themselves. In my opinion, Fairbank and the Old China Hands are finished. It happened that China’s Acdemy of Social Sciences is unfortunately counting on John Fairbank and Owen Lattimore as their last straw today. — So to say that an academic rebuttal of John Fairbank would be equivalent to rebutting a myth, an ideaology, and an institution.

Back to China: Mao’s havoc and today’s havoc in China is equally damaging. Today’s China, being a friend of international capitalists, had only enslaved your brothers and sisters as the unlimited cheap supply of labor for the world. You won’t see the damages till 50 years later, 100 years later, or two centuries later.

I did not come to see the real history in one day. Those links I had pasted did not come to realize the truth at the beginning either. Freda Utley, while walking with Smedley like sisters in Wuhan in 1938, did not fully understand the evils till well after 10 years later. –Up to today, the truth that Utley had exposed in 1950, i.e., Acheson’s 2 billion crap as to the U.S. aid for Chiang Kai-shek, still was so elusive to the academics whose foundation of beliefs rested on John Fairbank’s ignorance.

 

Reference:

VENONA wiretap –  list of 300-500 CPUSA embedded in US government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona

The Harvard website still had this claim for his biography:
“In Chungking, he was struck by the declining morale of the Nationalist government, and horrified by the grim lives of his old Peiping friends in their West China refuge. There began two lifelong commitments: to supporting liberal Chinese academics, morally and materially; and to warning Americans about China’s catastrophe. He gradually realized that if the United States remained tied to the inept and corrupt Nationalist regime, Sino-American common ground would shrink to nothing…”
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n52/ai_20852425

Early one morning in the summer of 1972, John King Fairbank, my senior colleague among Harvard’s East Asia faculty at the time, phoned to ask if I would look over a draft article for Foreign Affairs summing up his first trip to China since the 1940s. The piece was fairly indulgent toward Mao’s regime. Over lunch that day, I said to Fairbank, “This trip to China must have been moving.” He nodded and said, “Well, you know, I’ve been on their [CCP] side ever since 1943.” In Fairbank’s draft I queried the sentence: “The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many centuries.” The dean of American Sinology, to whom I owe much, stuck with it. But he added the words: “At least, most Chinese seem now to believe so, and it will be hard to prove otherwise.”

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/china.50/imperial.icon/rulers/

“Every peasant believed in the umbilical relationship between man and nature, and therefore between natural disasters and human calamities,” noted the late historian John Fairbank in his book, “China: A New History.”

A Chinese emperor ruled under the auspices of the “Mandate of Heaven” — the heaven-sent right to rule, similar to the “divine right of kings” in Western civilization. Confucian practitioners in dynastic China were taught that the mandate could be taken away from immoral or tyrannical leaders. Emperors who had apparently lost heaven’s mandate were considered ripe for ouster. Temple of Heaven The Temple of Heaven in the southern part of Beijing was built in 1420 so the emperors could worship heaven and pray for abundant harvests In 1949 the Chinese Communists were clearly defeating the rival Nationalists in the nation’s prolonged civil war. Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader who had received military, financial and moral support from the West for decades, was seen by much of China as tyrannical and corrupt. As Chiang’s armies lost one battle after another to the Communists and inflation spiraled out of control, it appeared to many Chinese that the Nationalists had lost their “Mandate of Heaven.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3115

Fairbank himself said at the Arizona conference, to which I refer, that the China journalists in the Forties wrote very superficially, and he said as well that when he accepted Zhou Enlai’s invitation to China in 1972 he was “woefully ignorant” about Maoism and the great Party campaigns. So was I, and so was Edgar Snow when he visited China after Mao’s victory, and he remained that way into the early Seventies. His old friends in Peking, who were in prison when Snow was there, still speak bitterly of his studious determination not to know what was happening.

As I wrote, however, for years Fairbank tried to explain the Communist leaders to us as people following traditional Chinese patterns, although with some new techniques. More recently, and I criticized Mosher for omitting to say this, Fairbank made it clear that something much more oppressive was going on. But Fairbank criticized Simon Leys for attributing too much importance to a tiny circle of Westernized Chinese interested in human rights, and suggested that Zhou Enlai—that consummate deceiver—could put the record straight.

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/33559-why-did-china-become-communist/page__st__30

About Pepper.

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/798-long-march/page__st__15

maurice meisner, like Suzanne Pepper, were dupes who had no clue about the materials they cited had been written by the Comintern agents. They had the chance to examine the VENOANA PAPER to revise their views, but they refused to do so, especially so with Peper who published her Chinese civil war book without a word’s change.

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/10585-is-chiang-really-a-villian-as-portrayed/page__st__105

John Service, a faithful follower of Stilwell, had the unbelievably blind faith in Zhou Enlai whom Utley had described as someone with all smiles on face except for the eyes. Fairbank shared the same as Service. The two influenced Suzanne Pepper on the book as to China’s civil wars. In the 1970s, after the divulsion of horrors of the Cultural Revolution, Fairbank was said to have commented that Zhou could “fix all”, i.e., the abnormality of the CR. Service, in an interview in the 90s, still shared the same thoughts as when he was in the 40s.