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John King Fairbank (May 24, 1907 – September 14, 1991), was a prominent American academic and historian of China. ==Education and early career== Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota in 1907.〔 He was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol). As an undergraduate, Charles Kingsley Webster, the distinguished British diplomatic historian then teaching at Harvard, advised him to choose a relatively undeveloped field of study, and suggested that since the Qing dynasty imperial archives were then being opened, China's foreign relations would be a prudent choice learned (Fairbank later confessed that he then knew nothing about the state of China itself). In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard ''summa cum laude'', he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. At Oxford, Fairbank began his study of the Chinese language and sought the counsel of H.B. Morse, retired from the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. On Webster's advice, he had read Morse's three-volume study of Qing dynasty foreign relations on the ship coming to England. Morse became his mentor. The ambitious young scholar decided to go to Beijing to do research in 1932.〔John King Fairbank, ''Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir'' (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 18-22.〕 In Beijing, he studied at Tsinghua University under the direction of the prominent historian Tsiang Tingfu who introduced him to the study of newly available diplomatic sources and the perspectives of Chinese scholarship which balanced the British approaches he saw at Oxford.〔Ch 7, "T.F. Tsiang and Modernization," in Fairbank, ''Chinabound'', pp. 85-93.〕 Wilma Cannon came to China to marry Fairbank and began a career of her own in Chinese art history. He and Wilma came to know to a number of Chinese intellectuals, and became especially warm friends with Liang Sicheng, the son of the distinguished Chinese reformer Liang Qichao, and his wife, Whei-yin, whom they called Phyllis. The Lins introduced them to Jin Yuelin, a philosopher trained at Columbia University. Through them, Fairbank wrote later, he and Wilma began to sense the Chinese problem, the "necessity to winnow the past and discriminate among things foreign, what to preserve and what to borrow..." 〔Fairbank, ''Chinabound'', pp. 104-106.〕 In 1936, Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. for his thesis, which he revised and eventually published as ''Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854'' in 1953. Fairbank returned to Harvard in 1936 to take up a position teaching Chinese history, Harvard's first full-time specialist on that subject. He and Edwin O. Reischauer worked out a year long introductory survey which covered China and Japan, and later Korea and Southeast Asia. The course was known as "Rice Paddies," and became the basis for the influential texts, ''East Asia: The Great Tradition'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and ''East Asia: The Modern Transformation'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).〔Paul Evans, ''John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China'', pp. 60-62.〕 Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Fairbank was enlisted to work for the US government, which included service in the OSS and the Office of War Information in Chongqing, the temporary capital of Nationalist China. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John K. Fairbank」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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