Journal of Australia-China Affairs 2014

Appended in Fairbank’s biographical study of his mentor, there is a letter addressed to Fairbank by H.B. Morse. Recognising the historiographical significance of Fairbank’s approach to Chinese history, Morse writes that: when some Harvard student, grandson of the grandson of a member of the class of 1874, shall desire to refute the erroneous and senile deduction of his professor John King Fairbank (A.B. Harv., B.Litt. & D.Phil Oxon.) soon to be Emeritus, and should refer his aged professor to his work, written in the freshness and elasticity of youth, on British Policy in China etc. they will note with pride the fact... that it was to some extent inspired by a classmate of his own great great grandfather. 22 Although the criticism did not come from the great-­‐great grandson of an 1874 Harvard graduate, sixteen years after Fairbank received permission to dedicate his publication to his former teacher, his methodology was indeed critiqued. China’s Modernisation in 1960s American Scholarship In 1969, amidst America’s increasing involvement in the Vietnam War, a young graduate student acerbically challenged Fairbank’s method, which he believed had portrayed the Sino-­‐Western relationship in nineteenth-­‐century China as a relatively benign interaction. James Peck was the author of an article published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1969 entitled ‘The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of America’s China Watchers’. 23 Peck argued that scholars of nineteenth century Chinese history had adopted a similar framework for all of their interpretative exercises, which attempted to excuse or obfuscate Western imperialism. This supposedly insidious methodology came in the form of ‘modernisation theory’. Boiled down to its essence, modernisation theory contends that societies can be divided into two categories: ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. In order for a society to develop beyond its ‘traditional’ form, it must undergo a series of social, political and economic changes. These stages of structural evolution mark a society’s journey into a ‘modern’—and therefore more advanced—form. There is an underlying assumption that, with adequate assistance, less developed nations are able to progress beyond their rudimentary structure to become like highly developed countries. China, with its apparently static societal arrangement, belonged to the ‘traditional’ group. Although there is a vast corpus of literature analysing modernisation theory, Peck basically believed that American historians of China mistook this theory of sociological interpretation as historical method, which consequently allowed them to neglect Chinese victimisation at the hands of Western imperialists and then propose that China must adopt certain Western features in order to reach modernity. 24 Furthermore, modernisation theory was not merely an intellectual construct, but rather “an ideological construct used by leading China specialists to justify America’s political, military and economic intervention in Asia in the postwar era”. 25 In an article laced with derision, Peck contends that scholars of Chinese history had claimed Western expansion and dominance occurred due to a “unique constellation of pre-­‐22 Fairbank, Coolidge and Smith, H.B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China, p. 2. 23 James Peck, ‘The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of America's China Watchers’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 2, no. 1, 1969, pp. 59-­‐69. 24 Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 107. 25 Ibid, p. 98. JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIA-CHINA AFFAIRS 41