Hi all, in the topics on the PRC and ROC forum i have noticed that a large number of historians are cited by many people, and that there is some controversy over how reliable some of these historians are and the quality of their analysis.

So an idea occurred to me:why not canvass views on who was/is the overall best historian of PRC history? I'm going to start the ball-rolling by mentioning Roderick Macfarquhar, who currently works at the Fairbank Insitute at Harvard and who is probably best known as editor of volumes 14 and 15 of the Cambridge History of China, and acclaimed author of the 'Origins of the Cultural Revolution' trilogy, which examines the many factors that drove such an event. His writing style is superb, with some brilliant metaphors, and he makes extensive use of stats to back up assertions, something which i find very useful.

Would anybody else care to venture a suggestion? Or does everyone agree that R Macfarquhar is the best historian of the PRC era so far?

Must the historian be from a West background? Do Japanese historians count?

They can be from any background and from any country.

John Fairbank is also a prominent historian in the field of the PRC era. In fact he co-wrote Volume 14 and 15 of the The Cambridge History of China with Macfarquahar, which deals with the PRC. Johnathan Spence is also a leading historian od the PRC. I would not be able to say who is the best since I have not read all of these historian's works.

MattW are you thinking about becoming a sinologist or a historian?

Becoming a sinologist is what i'd really like to do in life. Fairbank's writings are good, truly the father of historical study of the modern era. Spence is also very talented, and its hard to call between the three, but Macfarquhar just does it for me. But Spence's 'The Search for Modern China' is excellent.

Denis Twitchett, a leading British sinologist, is also an excellent historian. Twitchett alongside Fairbank spent 40 years publishing The Cambridge History of China. It is 15 volumes long and not all volumes have been published yet. I have read a section on the Boxer Rebellion in one of those volumes. Luckily my local library has most of the volumes. It would be a real challenge to read all of those volumes, let alone write all of it! So I admire these historians' tenacity and dedication.

Matt I wish you all the best for the future, and I hope you can become a sinologist one day if that is what you really want to do! The journey is going to be tough, since you'll need to do a PhD and master the Chinese language alongside other languages such as Japanese and German. However do not lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel; once you are well established the rewards are great!

Denis Twitchett- do you have any titles of books by this author?

I do not, but I have read parts of The Cambridge History of China.

I would love to own copies of the later volumes, but they are so expensive!

If you have not read Cambridge history, how could you claim, as some of the dupes (mostly student-sinologists of Fairbank) had also claimed, that Fairbank was the "best" historian on China?

I would like to give you a link to the Cambridge history
http://library.sunxuming.com/lishi/jianqia...10045.htm#_ftn9
for you to do some diligent studies and then we could come back to discuss where Fairbank's credits were and where his mistakes and errors were and where he could have deliberately misguided the innocent, you and me.

Fairbank had the access to the resources of ROC on Taiwan to write his history, such as "jiao fei zhan shi" [which was a must read similar to Japan's battle history series edited by the self defense agency]. He repeatedly cited the records of "jiao fei zhan shi" series ( the battle history of banditry quelling) for his book. Where Fairbank failed to write an impartial and objective history was that he had chosen to place doubts on the ROC accounts while having trust in PRC's stories 100%.

Let's do a simple comparison of PRC vs ROC versions of a battle called the Huwan Battle to illustrate the point of how to reconcile two versions of history.

PRC site

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:47EDC...lient=firefox-a

浒湾战斗于1933年11月11日至13日在黎川西北浒湾至八角亭一带进行。浒湾战斗仍然是李德、博古收复黎川以实现彻敌于国门之外的冒险主义作战方针的 一部分。强攻黎川不行，他们打算先攻克黎川外围敌人据点，然后再收复黎川。11日，他们下令新组建才1个月又缺乏训练的红七军团向浒湾进攻。还未等部队接 近浒湾，在八角亭附近即遭到由浒湾和金溪、琅琚出击的敌之重兵夹击。七军团战斗力本弱，加上敌我力量悬殊，损失很大。红三军团彭德怀闻讯后火速赴援。敌人 一面在八角亭东南面抗击红三军团的进攻；一面则猛攻坚守八角亭附近高地的红七军团。12日，红三军团多次向敌阵地攻击，在敌人密集火力和飞机低空扫射下， 遭受重大伤亡，被迫撤出战斗；红七军团更无力抵挡敌人的进攻，在阵地被敌人突破后，也仓忙后撤。这一仗，红军伤亡共达1100余人。

What it said above was that Red Army lost 1100 while being pincer-attacked by government troops at Huwan.

Note wherever Red Army failed to give the numbering of government troops, there was the usual cover-up.

What had happened, as recorded by regimental commander Shi Jue and the "jiao fei zhan shi" ( the battle history of banditry quelling), was that Red Army under Xiao Jingguang surrounded Li Liangrong's regiment at Huwan for inducing government troops for an ambush on the road. 4th Division, with three regiments, moved along the Huwan-Jinxi Highway for sending the relief. Midway, the three regiments were surrounded by Xiao's Red Army at the front and Peng's Red Army from the rears. Sh Jue's regiment gunned down three hours' duration of human wave attack by Peng's Red Army, while the other two regiments failed to breach the Daxianling Ridge guarded by Xiao's Red Army. The second day, under the plane bombing, government troops broke through the encirclement to reunite with Li Liangrong's regiment at Huwan. Shi Jue pointed out that they killed 3000 Red Army, with 5-6000 Red Army wounded shoulder-stretcher-carried to Red Army hospitals for one week.

此次浒湾大捷，共军在战场上遗尸三千多具，伤五、六千人，共军每一站动员三千人运送伤兵达一星期之久

We could analyze Cambridge history paragraph by paragraph to see what the quality of this so-called "masterpiece" was.

No historical work is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Fairbank has a reputation for good reason. And Ahxiang, lets keep away from words like 'dupes' - these discussions should be friendly where others feel they can join in...

The students and sinologists associated with Fairbank knew themselves, the day the VENONA scripts were released, that they had been duped. Just that some of them refused to acknowledge that they had been wrong. There are tons of articles covering their reflections on their blunders.

So, HH, anymore historians you favour?

Denis Twitchett (1925-2006) was actually a specialist of the Tang dynasty. He wrote three chapters (including a long intro) in the Sui-Tang volume of the Cambridge History of China ("CHC" from now on). His other famous books are The Writing of Official History under the Tang, Printing and Publishing in Medieval China, and the timeless bedtime classic Financial Administration under the Tang Dynasty. He also wrote influential articles on many Tang topics.

Fairbank (1907-1991) was considered a specialist of "modern China," a term which in his time meant China after 1839, the beginning of the Opium War. My perception was that he did most of his scholarly work on the late Qing and the Republican periods (the era of "treaty ports"). In my opinion, his best book is Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 (1953), not his best-known work, but probably his most carefully researched. You can see the Table of Contents here.

In the eye of contemporary historians of the Qing, Fairbank's main bias (a very large one, actually) was his focus on "China's reaction to the West," as if all of Chinese history after 1840 had been dictated by China's handling of Western powers. Because he taught at Harvard and had a large number of students (including Jonathan Spence), Fairbank was probably the single most influential historian of China in the post-war era.

CHC was a collective endeavor that started in Cambridge University and eventually moved to Princeton University, where it is still based. Twitchett and Fairbank are listed as editors-in-chief for all the volumes, but they didn't work on all of them. The real editor of the volume on "The Qing dynasty until 1800," for instance, is Willard Peterson, not Fairbank and Twitchett. Some of the volumes were actually published after Fairbank's death!

My choice for a good (if not the best) historian of modern China would be Chen Yongfa [Ch'en Yung-fa] 陳永發, who is now based at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. His main (only?) English-language book is Making Revolution: the Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937-1945 (1986), which is based on his Stanford Ph.D. dissertation. Chen tries to forget about propaganda from both sides. Instead he analyzes the rationales, implementation, and actual effects of CCP policies on peasants in various areas, including Yan'an, where the CCP was said to have been so well received. It's very dense reading, but well worth it if you want to go beyond both Edgar Snow (of Red star over China fame) and those who criticized the CCP simply because they were communists.

Madalibi

Do you know why Fairbank would hold such a bias?


That's about all the PRC historians I know. I know more British Imperial historians, so I can give a summary if you want.

You are one rare quality poster on this forum.

Fairbank's historical view was formed while cohorting with Smedley and Harold Issacs while Issacs was handpicked and trained by Smedley to run the China Forum with funds from Chinese communist underground. Fairbank was sly enough to back out of Smedley's Russian GRU application but did join the communist Civil Rights League under a Chinese alias last name "Fan", not "Fei" as he was known today.

Following is a good article on Fairbank and his boasting of his taking the RIGHT side before the bankruptcy of the Chinese communist revolution was known to the outside world.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...n52/ai_20852425

Mao in history - Chinese's perception of Mao Zedong
National Interest, The, Summer, 1998 by Ross Terrill

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 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."

Very briefly, because I have to run! When Fairbank started writing, there was basically no field of "modern Chinese history." "Sinology" was largely based in Europe, and it focused on ancient history and on documentary issues (this is too short a summary, of course, but you get the contrast). Fairbank was really the "founder" of "modern Chinese history" and he decided to center it on China's relations with the West, an understandable choice at the time for a Western scholar. But there were more factors: first, Fairbank and everybody interested in China at the time saw that China had experienced a very chaotic hundred years since the Opium War, and they interpreted this turmoil as China's struggle to "modernize." The questions were: "Can China modernize?" and "Why hasn't it done so earlier?" Since Western countries had already "modernized" at the time, Fairbank and his students saw the West as the main bringer of modernization to China. That's why they focused on the West's "impact" on China, and on China's "response" to this impact, thinking that these interactions held the key to the failure of China's modernization.

So in a nutshell:
- General interest in the "modernization" narrative
- The West as the bringer of modernity
- Focus on China's "failure to respond"
- Focus on emerging modernity in treaty ports
- Consequence: neglect of the possible role of imperialism

Much more could be said. Let me know if you're interested in hearing more!

Cheers,
Madalibi

This post of yours, however, seems to acquit Fairbank of the "political" motives behind his writings on China.

Fairbank, when first going to China, was on a British scholarship, which was to study the British-controlled customs. However, upon arriving in China, he began to cohort with Comintern agents. Smedley's way of training agents was to send the perspective recruit on a purported mission to feel the society and environment. For Issacs, Smedley sent him on a Yangtze trip with Frank Glass. For Fairbank, Smedley arranged to have Fairbank and Issacs take a rafting trip along the Jehol River. During the two years of stay in China, Fairbank was provided with propaganda materials from Comintern and Chinese communist underground. So, after a return to US for teaching, he returned to wartime Chungking in 1940s to work on projects of the Office of War Information, working closely with Owne Lattimore and the same old gang of Chinese Comintern agents [Chen Hansheng et al since the early 1930s], beginning what he called taking the side of Chinese communists from 1943 onward, and taking part in the sabotage of China's war time efforts, such as the Treasury Department's gold shipment.

Fairbank took the [Chinese Communist] side in 1932, not 1943.

For anyone who is interested in finding more about Fairbank, please refer to the discourse at
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3115
The Myth of Mao's China* (May 30, 1991)

Let's see what Jonathan Mirsky said about Fairbank:

"But I think Mosher is right to observe how many American reporters, academics, and tourists, from Shirley MacLaine to J.K. Galbraith, didn't understand what the Party had done and was doing. Such visitors have been well analyzed, as I write in my review, in Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims. . .

"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. . .

"No review of Mosher's book could ignore his claims about John Fairbank, and I tried to discuss them fairly. I agree that Fairbank was one of the foremost, and one of the wisest, experts in the field of Ching studies and that he has been a great leader in encouraging and improving Chinese scholarship generally. I said nothing about Fairbank having anything to do with losing China and I noted how libelous it is for Mosher to label Fairbank a Maoist. 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. . .

"Already in the 1950s, between 400,000 and 700,000 were persecuted for doing so. To have largely ignored such a record is not what Professor Thomson mocks as an "ultimate crime"; but it is sad that Fairbank, who for years wrote with perspicacity for Americans trying to understand China, did not have more to say about it. Rather weakly, Professor Thomson concedes that "under evolving international standards" of human rights, China—I would say the Party—should no longer be considered a special case. Professor Thomson should ask himself just when, and why, "China" was entitled to special status, and how he came to think it was. . ."

Are you implying that Fairbank was a Marxist historian? How did you know Fairbank?


This implies Fairbank was a Whig historian.

So this is confusing!

In a nut shell, it was a small world. Fairbank's uncle saved the life of Smedley from some Indian prison, and hence the bonding of the two, as well as his entry into the communist undergound in early 1930s. See my other post about Fairbank's role in China in 1940s.

[Ahxiang: I just saw your latest long post. As I say below, I'm out of time right now, but I think my present post addresses some of your concerns and I partly answer HH's question at the same time, so let's me just post my original message. Bye!]

Hi ahxiang,

Thank you for your generous appraisal of my modest posts. You yourself bring a lot of much-needed evidence and articulation to our discussions of modern Chinese history. (And when you drop the vitriol, you turn into one of our best posters. ) I see Fairbank as a complex man, or at least Fairbank's political standpoint as a complex one. Like many American visitors to China during WW2, he thought the KMT was deeply corrupt and inefficient, and he had the foresight to predict the CCP's victory in the civil war. He was probably misled in part by clever CCP manipulation of people like Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow (Snow later wrote reflections on the things he had missed when he visited Yan'an in the 1940s). Ross Terrill recounts a conversation that took place just after the US had normalized diplomatic relations with China. Since Fairbank had advocated this policy since the 1940s (I think), it's normal that he said something like "I've been on their side since 1943," but saying - in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, no less - that Mao was "the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many centuries" was certainly an over-statement (and my last sentence is definitely an under-statement).

As for the "complexity" I mentioned: I see a strong tension between Fairbank's assessment of the CCP and his general approach to the history of modern China. Because he consistently treated Qing China as immobile (he attributed this immobility in part to the traditional "tributary system" through which China dealt with foreign countries), he described most Western interventions against the Qing as benign. In other words, because he presented Western powers as the heralds of modernity (something valued as "good"), he almost completely obscured the effects of imperialism on 19th-century China. In this way, he was directly at odds with the CCP's official interpretation of history, which blamed so much on imperialism.

Fairbank's benign view of imperialism, and the fact that his students' research projects were often funded by the Ford Foundation (which allegedly shared policy goals with the CIA during the Cold War), made him (and actually the whole "China's response to the West" approach) a target of more ardent left-wing critiques in the 1970s. Ironically, these young critiques were enthusiastic about... the Cultural Revolution. Very interesting discussion, but I'm really out of time!

Cheers,
Madalibi

Fairbank sounds like a Macaulay-esque figure, extolling the virtues of Western imperialism! He may have had sympaphies towards the Maoist revoution in China, but he certainly was not a Marxist historian.

Thanks madalibi, ahxiang and Matt for the constructive discussion!

Thanks for the info madalibi. I haven't heard of Chen Yongfa, but i'll add his english book to my reading list i think An analysis that lays aside propaganda is certainly an interesting one...

Just to add a few viewpoints to the commonly-perceived Qing's immobility and passivity.

In some historian's view, i.e., Tang Degang's view, late Manchu-era, the Chinese were on a whole aggressively seeking a way to modernize China. This was after the Boxer debacle, of course. Manchu abolished imperial exam and sent students to Europe, America and Japan on a massive scale. Politically, they began to adopt the parliamentary monarchy system. Militarily, they had a nationwide military modernization plan, i.e., the New Army (xin jun). Most of the high-ranking officer corps were either from Baoding or Japan's infantry cadet academy. The Baoding Cadet Academy had about 6000 graduates who dominated China's military for 30 years. - It was just a misfortune that Manchus reaped the fruits of cucumber with the planting of the seeds of beans, meaning the New Army digging the tomb for the Manchus. Tang Degang had other observations as well. Tang believed that the Chinese in late Manchu era were far better that Chinese in early republican China, while the Chinese in republican China were far better than Chinese on Taiwan. Living standards wise: Zhang Guotao's mother claimed that they had a much better life in the 1910s than in 1920s, and life in 1930s was miserable because of the rampage of the Red Army, of course. If anyone wanted to calculate the living standards using the real purchasing power, he or she might actually corroborated what Zhang Guotao's mother described. When I read history accounts, I found out that the reason hundreds of thousands of Chinese had gone to Japan for studies was that the ticket cost probably just one day's meals in 1920s/1930s.

From 1900-1901 to 1911, Manchu China did not experience immediate danger from foreign powers. The US had proposed the open door policy, setting the rule of fair games for the powers to abide by. Qing's ultimate demise should be construed as a re-awakening of Chinese nationalism, unleashed by Manchu China's self-defeat in the process of modernization.

By the way, Tang Degang, the writer of Hu SHi's biography, is one of my most revered historians.

In Taiwan, senior scholar Wu Dayou obtained funding from Chinese Education & Culture Foundation for a grand project on "History of China's Last Two Hundred Years". This yielded the two volume "Sevety Years Of Chinese Communist Revolution" by historian Chen Yongfa in 1997.

Chen Yongfa, who specialized in CCP's agrarian revolution during WWII as his doctoral dissertation, believed in reciting "historical facts" in lieu of generalizing "cause and effect".

Chen used the same sources as Fairbank, i.e., "jiao fei zhan shi" and Red Army "hong xing bao" - red star daily. Chen pointed out what Fairbank failed to see or deliberately cut off. See example below:

Chen Yongfa pointed out that CCP lost its resistance war due to constraints of resources. Back in early 1933, "field and land survey" was conducted for resource control. Mao Tse-tung was ordered to conduct a new round of "field and land survey" for sake of recruiting Red Army soldiers, appropriating labor, borrowing grains, and confiscating rich people's assets. Soviet government also resorted to issuance of "public debts & endentures" in addition to levies and taxation. Women were encouraged in taking over the work of their men. Continuing the stringent policy of "kuo [expanding] hong [red, i.e., Red Army soldiers]", CCP proposed a target of recruiting 150000 soldiers. Chen Yongfa stated that only 110000 recruits filled in the ranks from Aug 1933 to July 1934, with an end result that 80% of populace from age 16 to 45 were drained from the Changgang & Caixi counties of Jiangxi Soviet base. As pointed out by Chen Yongfa, the heavy-handed taxation and levy by CCP during the 5th siege induced a new round of "Purging Reactionaries Movement" that would see a batch of local communist leaders executed for failing to fulfill the quotas alloted".

Has this work been put into English?

Unfortunately not. The original title is Zhongguo gongchan geming qishinian 中國共產革命七十年. For people who can read Chinese, there is a long review of it here. The reviewer, Yang Kuisong 楊奎松, is a well-known historian who has written a lot about China's foreign relations, especially with the Soviet Union and the United States. He works in the PRC, but he is not an ideologue. He is actually a serious and well-respected researcher whose works are broadly cited in Western studies of Chinese foreign policy. (Yang's website is also a great resource if you're interested in PRC history.)

Unfortunately I haven't read Chen's Chinese book, and I don't have time to read Yang's review right now. All I can tell you for now is that Yang liked Chen's English book better than Chen's survey of "Seventy years of Communist revolution." Gotta go!

Ah well, it better stay off the reading list then until i can read chinese!