Talk:John King Fairbank

Latest comment: 6 years ago by CWH in topic Name and identification

Name and identification

edit

Changed the format of the Chinese name, as discussed in Joseph Needham. Also changed "Sinologist," as Fairbank specifically did not use the term for himself. ch (talk) 23:11, 10 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

I changed "Sinologist" to "historian of CHina," which seems smoother. True, "Sinologist" is now often used for any scholar of China, but Fairbank wrote in a number of places to distinguish himself from the sinologists of the day who he felt, rightly or wrongly, limited themselves to philology and textual studies. He wrote in the first edition of United States and China (1948), to take but one one example, that the book stressed the work of the new generation of “specialists on China, not because their work is innately superior to that of older European Sinology, by which they have benefitted, but because it is, on the whole, more recent and up-to-date, as well as accessible to the American reader.” [351] Another example is his 1969 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, where he views sinology, history, social science, and area studies as four separate spheres. ["Assignment for the 1970's: The Study of American-East Asian Relations," American Historical Review 74 (February 1969): 861-879. Reprinted: China Perceived pp. 207-233].ch (talk) 19:21, 8 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Expansion

edit

I expanded, using the books by Evans and Cohen/Goldman, but the article should be further fleshed out. ch (talk) 00:39, 11 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

費万字 (Fei Wanzi)

edit

I understand that when he was in China, he was an assiduous seeker of knowledge about the Chinese language, to the point where he was dubbed 費万字 (Fei Wanzi), meaning the "ten-thousand character Fei", informally recognizing all of his efforts in learning new characters.

I believe that this is documented in Teddy White's book "The China Hands."

Theodore_H._White

My copy of this book is in a box somewhere in the attic after our move. If someone can verify this, please do so. Bill Jefferys (talk) 04:04, 5 December 2011 (UTC)Reply

The reference is from E.J. Kahn's The China Hands ((Penguin: 1976) p. 66 n. 11. After the sentence you quote, Kahn says that one aid in learning Chinese is the use of cards with Chinese on one side and English on the other. JKF in the early 1930s "was almost never seen without a pocketful of cards, and he knew hundreds of characters that most Chinese never used. After a while, Fairbank began using cards that had only Chinese on them, and on spotting an educated Chinese would flash one of them -- bearing, like as not, some obscure word -- and ask what it meant. Among some Chinese, who did not take well to the notion of being beaten by a foreigner at their own game, Fairbank became known as The Terror of Peking, too." Kahn doesn't give a source. ch (talk) 05:27, 5 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the correction. There's a reference to a book by another author, China Hands in the White article, but the book I was thinking of was his autobiography, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure.. White studied under Fairbank at Harvard before he himself went to China. But I have Kahn's book (again, packed in a box in the attic), so this is where I must have seen it.
Is this worth mentioning in the article proper? Since you have ready access to the source, would you be willing to do this if you think it appropriate? Bill Jefferys (talk) 14:42, 5 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
edit

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on John K. Fairbank. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 04:15, 25 April 2017 (UTC)Reply