biography
| name: |
Fairbank, John K(ing)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1907–91)
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| biography:
| Historian, born in Huron, South Dakota, USA. He studied at Harvard, then spent six years travelling in China, teaching himself Chinese in order to read the country's 19th-c archives. He taught at Harvard (1936–77), where he developed a pioneering modern East Asian history programme with his colleague Edwin O Reischauer and directed the East Asian Research Center (1955–73). A target of Senator McCarthy's anti-Communist hearings in the 1950s, he went on to become a leading advocate of normalizing relations with Communist China in the 1960s. The creator of the field of modern Chinese history, his books include The United States and China (1948) and China: a New History (1992). |
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