He is credited with building the field of China studies in the United States after World War II with his organizational ability, his mentorship of students, support of fellow scholars, and formulation of basic concepts to be tested.
As an undergraduate, he was advised by Charles Kingsley Webster, the distinguished British diplomatic historian who was then teaching at Harvard, to choose a relatively-undeveloped field of study.
Wilma had studied fine arts at Radcliffe College and had been an apprentice to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera before she traveled to China.
Fairbank wrote later that he and Wilma began to sense through them that the Chinese problem was the "necessity to winnow the past and discriminate among things foreign, what to preserve and what to borrow...."[7] Sicheng gave Wilma and John Chinese names, his was Fei Zhengqing, "Fei" being a common family name, and "Zhengqing", meaning "upright and clear".
In 1941 he and Edwin O. Reischauer worked out a year-long introductory survey covering China and Japan, later adding Korea and Southeast Asia.
When he returned to Harvard after the war, Fairbank inaugurated a master's degree program in area studies, one of several major universities in the United States to do so.
[12] Fairbank raised money to support fellowships for graduate students, trained influential China historians at Harvard, and placed them widely in universities and colleges in the US and overseas.
He welcomed and funded researchers from all over the world to spend time in Cambridge and hosted a series of conferences, which brought scholars together and yielded publications, many of which Fairbank edited himself.
[13] Fairbank and his colleagues at Harvard, Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert Craig, wrote a textbook on China and Japan, A History of East Asian Civilization.
[citation needed] Among his students were Albert Feuerwerker, Merle Goldman, Joseph Levenson, Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, Akira Iriye, Philip A. Kuhn, Kwang-ching Liu, Roderick MacFarquhar, Rhoads Murphey, David S. Nivison, Andrew Nathan, David Tod Roy, Benjamin I. Schwartz, Franz Schurmann, Teng Ssu-yu, James C. Thomson Jr., Theodore White, John E. Wills Jr., Alexander Woodside, Guy S. Alitto, Mary C.
[15][16] In the late 1940s, Fairbank was among the so-called China Hands, who predicted the victory of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party and advocated the establishment of relations with the new government.
[20] The younger scholars charged that Fairbank and other leaders of the area studies movement had helped to justify American imperialism in Asia.
By his grounding the study of Asia in modernization theory, Fairbank and other liberal scholars presented China as an irrational country, which needed American tutelage.
[22] In December 1969, Howard Zinn and other members of the Radical Historians' Caucus attempted to persuade the American Historical Association to pass an anti-Vietnam War resolution.
[1] In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about John King Fairbank, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 600+ works in 1,500+ publications in 15 languages and 43,000+ library holdings.