Chapter 23 The eyes of business history figures

On January 20, 1932, Fei Zhengqing, a tall, thin, 25-year-old graduate student from Harvard University, arrived at Wusongkou Wharf in Shanghai by steamship. He originally planned to hold an oriental wedding here with his bride, Fei Weimei. After the "January 28th" war broke out, he fled to Beijing in a hurry. The scale of the wedding was smaller than he expected but full of more mysterious atmosphere.He recorded in his diary, "I took the bride home along the road of the palace, drove through the gate of the palace, and arrived at the alley where we lived at dusk. We ate Western food sweetly and intimately by candlelight. The sound of flutes and gongs for Chinese weddings.” In such a cultural interweaving, Fairbank began his destined “Chinese life.”

After being newly married, Fairbank stayed in China intermittently for seven years. He went to many places and met many first-class Chinese scholars. His favorite friends were Liang Qichao's son Liang Sicheng and his extremely beautiful wife Lin Huiyin. Unlike the politician Leighton Stuart, the pedantic Fairbank did not like to "stand aside" easily. He just wanted to see China with his own eyes.At the beginning, he was full of pessimism and doubts about China's future. He even believed that if Japan expanded its aggression, "the peasants will silently welcome them, because the situation of the peasants will not be worse than it is now." However, four years later, he These views gradually changed.

During the Anti-Japanese War, he presided over the work of the Beijing Information Office of the U.S. State Department. Reporting China’s developments to President Roosevelt and making suggestions were his most important tasks. In these later public letters, Fairbank has been sorting out his own views on China. Observation, at the beginning, he believed that China was a battlefield where American values ​​conflicted with other values, so cultural transformation was the most important topic. After a few years, he realized that the promotion of science and democracy seemed more urgent. When he came into contact with After meeting some leftists, he believed that those Chinese who had been educated by Western intellectuals who could solve the problems of land and peasants were the future leaders of China.These are all intertwined issues, which have been presented to all those who care about China since the beginning of the 20th century. For a hundred years, they have been intertwined and intertwined, and they have always moved forward in a chaotic manner. .With the eyes of an outsider, Fairbank sometimes sees clearly and sometimes sees blurryly, but because he does not have too many emotional factors involved, he is a little more real than most Chinese people.

In 1948, Fairbank published "America and China". Since then, he has been recognized as a first-class expert on China issues. Since then, he has been standing at the point of contact between the United States and China, looking forward to left and right.His views became more and more pragmatic. He was the first well-known person who advocated the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US government and the People's Republic of China. Once the Vietnam War was over, he suggested contacting China through tourism and advocated the lifting of the trade embargo.“Ideological paranoia is harming the interests of the United States and China,” he said, even on the academic side, he has increasingly tended to methodological discussions.Roderick MacFarquhar hurriedly published "The Origin of the Cultural Revolution: Volume I" in 1973. He sent the manuscript to Fairbank at the first time, hoping to get the advice of this most authoritative expert on China. , Fairbank liked this very talented young man who was fascinated by Chinese issues but had never been to China. He transferred Mike to the Fairbank Research Center of Harvard University, and finally let him take over as the center Director, but he had an interesting piece of advice for the latter, he told Mike, "When boating against the current of the Yellow River in China, you often see boats going forward in a twist and turn, and you don't notice those boats on the shore. People who are stretching their fibers." In other words, you have to stand higher and farther to see the whole truth.

In his later years, Fairbank firmly believed that China and the United States may be on two paths that will eventually meet, because we are both committed to our own modernization. He wrote in a book published in 1987, "Deng Xiaoping's pragmatism in recent years is not reminiscent of Mao, but of John Dewey's lectures on China in 1919 and the May 4th Movement at that time. In Fairbank's eyes, this long-span and dramatic historical continuation seems to have never been broken. In another passage, he told people, "The path that China may choose, various events must The channel through which it flows is narrower than we can easily imagine." The reason why he said "narrower" instead of "more" or "wider" is indeed his own judgment, he is old A historian, he should have seen some kind of inevitability in history, otherwise he would not write like this.

Fairbank devoted himself to the study of China for 60 years until his death in 1991.He is recognized as the "No. 1 China hand" in the Western thought circle, and even a "beautiful skin" Westerner.He founded the Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, which is still the most important center for the study of Chinese issues in Europe and the United States. The name comes from the name of the small town where Harvard University is "Cambridge"——Cambridge). It has been written for 25 years and has gathered more than 100 Chinese research experts from 12 countries around the world to write articles, demonstrating the highest level of Chinese history research. . On September 12, 1991, he submitted the manuscript of "China: A New History" to Harvard University Press, and died two days later.

Fairbank likes to observe China from a bird's-eye view. In the first paragraph of the opening paragraph of his famous novel "America and China", he wrote: "The fundamental problems of Chinese people's lives can often be seen from the sky: the eroded Brownish-yellow hills, plains flooded by turbid rivers, small patches of green fields, and simple thatched huts gathered together to form villages, intricate silver-white rice terraces and waterways are the result of countless generations of hard work with broken backs. Witness—all this is due to too many people, too crowded on too little land, so that the resources of the land and the wits and endurance of man are exhausted for the maintenance of life."

Fairbank’s eyes must still be looking at China from the sky. He saw the continuous appreciation of the renminbi, he saw Chinese goods flocking to the world like a tide and began to encounter resistance, and he saw that the pattern of East Asia was evolving in a new direction. The United States is looking for a more balanced balancing mechanism.If he went back to Wusongkou, where he landed in China when he was 25 years old, he would see those foreign banks that had disappeared for half a century have moved back to their original buildings, and he returned to Xizongbu Hutong where he married Fei Weimei. You will see a new wedding ceremony being held at dusk, and the newlyweds are eating western food while listening to the melodious sound of flutes and noisy gongs outside the house.

In such a pair of eyes, history seems to have no suspense but only inevitable reincarnation.