Hey all - I read John Fairbank's China: A New History a couple months back and thought it was fairly dry. I lent it to a friend today, who within the first ~30 pages put it down because they found Fairbank making kind of ridiculous claims (i.e. filial piety is an inherently negative system, women ruined China whenever they were in power, the repeated use of "backwards" for a system different from a western one) and thought it was rather offensive. I hadn't noticed these things on my read through.
I suppose my question is - these criticisms are substantial and as far as I can tell, aren't really exaggerated. Has anyone else criticized Fairbank in such a way? Why is he still regarded as the "doyen of western Sinology" if so?
i didn't find any of those references in a cursory glance of the intro. Can you give me some page references? Everything I read was what I recall of Fairbank - top scholarship.
Fairbank is regarded to be the doyen of Western Sinology because he ardently promoted the field and had a massive impact on it by virtue of his prolific and wide ranging career, not just in academia but in shaping American political policy with respect to China. He was instrumental in depicting China not simply as a Communist enemy, and exerted a great effect on US perceptions of modern China.
That is not to say he was a perfect scholar. There are indeed flaws and mistakes in his scholarship. But that's the case for all scholars. Further, Fairbank produced his last work in 1991, and his writings therefore necessarily contains outdated theories and information. For example, he calls the Tuoba Xianbei 'Turks,' courtesy of an older view promoted by Wolfram Eberhard. Today, the main view is that they were proto-Mongolic, and so to students educated in modern times, Fairbank's writings are capable of sounding outlandish. But that's a problem plaguing all older Sinologists.
Lastly, it has to be emphasized that Fairbank's area of focus was modern China. He wrote about ancient China, but he was not a specialist, and he relied greatly on other scholars for those periods. Therefore, not all that you read from Fairbank is necessarily his scholarship. Fairbank's primary scholastic contribution is, in a way, the syncretization of a wide body of work into a coherent view about Chinese civilization and its offspring: modern Chinese society.