History of Sinology/Chapter 17

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Chapter 17: United States — From Friedrich Hirth to the Area Studies Model

1. Introduction: A Late Start and a Rapid Rise

American sinology was a latecomer. When the first American merchant ship, the Empress of China, reached Guangzhou in 1784 and its supercargo Samuel Shaw recorded his impressions of China, France had already possessed a tradition of Chinese studies stretching back two centuries to the Jesuit mission; Germany had produced Leibniz’s Novissima Sinica (1697); and even Sweden had accumulated a substantial body of knowledge about China through the voyages of the East India Company. Fifty years after the opening of American trade with China, “not a single American merchant could speak Chinese, much less conduct research on the country.”

Yet within a century and a half, American sinology — or, as its practitioners increasingly preferred to call it, “Chinese studies” — had become the largest, best-funded, and most institutionally diverse tradition of China scholarship in the world. This transformation was driven by three forces: the missionary enterprise of the nineteenth century, which produced the first generation of American scholars of China; the transplantation of European-trained scholars, above all the German Friedrich Hirth, who brought continental philological methods to American universities; and the revolution in the organization of knowledge that occurred during and after the Second World War, when John King Fairbank and his collaborators created the “area studies” model that would define American engagement with China for the rest of the twentieth century.

The history of American sinology is also, more than that of any other national tradition, a history shaped by politics. The Cold War, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and the normalization of Sino-American relations all left deep marks on the direction, funding, and institutional structure of American China scholarship. The tension between “sinology” in the European sense — the humanistic study of Chinese civilization through its written records — and “Chinese studies” as a social-scientific enterprise oriented toward contemporary policy concerns has been a defining feature of the American field since Fairbank’s time.

2. The Missionary Period (1830–1920)

American sinology was born in the treaty ports. The first American missionaries arrived in China in the 1830s, and for nearly a century thereafter, missionary scholars dominated American knowledge of China. Before the first Opium War, only four American missionaries resided permanently in the Guangzhou-Macau region: Elijah Coleman Bridgman, Samuel Wells Williams, Peter Parker, and Stephen Johnson. By 1850, American Protestant missionaries in China numbered eighty-eight; by 1877, when the first general Protestant conference was held, they had reached two hundred and ten.

Bridgman (1801–1861), who arrived in China in 1829, was America’s first sinologist. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had instructed him to “report on the character, customs, and manners of this people — particularly how their religion has influenced these aspects.” Bridgman found Western knowledge of China woefully inadequate: intellectual and moral exchange between East and West was “minimal.” He resolved to provide comprehensive, updated, and “unbiased” information about China.

The result was the Chinese Repository (Zhongguo Congbao), the first Western periodical devoted primarily to China. Founded in May 1832 and published until late 1851, the Chinese Repository covered Chinese politics, economy, geography, history, law, natural history, trade, and language. Though founded and initially edited by Bridgman, with Williams handling printing and later sharing editorial duties, the journal was a genuine scholarly enterprise. Each issue of four hundred to one thousand copies was distributed in China, the United States, and Europe, and its contents were frequently reprinted by major Western periodicals. As the American scholar Lawrence Thompson observed, the Chinese Repository was “not only the only sinological journal of the time” but one whose research articles “still have reference value today.”

Samuel Wells Williams (1812–1884) arrived in Guangzhou in 1833 as a printer for the American Board mission. He spent forty years in China, becoming one of the most accomplished American China scholars of the nineteenth century. After the destruction of his printing office in 1856 during Anglo-Chinese hostilities, he joined the American diplomatic mission, serving until 1876. In 1877, he returned to the United States and was appointed Yale College’s first Professor of Chinese Language and Literature — the first such professorship in American history.

Williams’s magnum opus was The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, Etc., of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants (1848, revised 1883). This two-volume, 1,200-page work was the first comprehensive American survey of China, covering twenty-three chapters on topics ranging from geography and natural resources to law, education, religion, trade, and the Opium War. The French bibliographer Henri Cordier placed it first among American works in his Bibliotheca Sinica, and Fairbank later judged it suitable as a “syllabus” for area studies.

Williams’s achievement was grounded in extraordinarily wide reading. His personal archives at Yale reveal reading lists encompassing dozens of Chinese classical and historical texts, from the Zhouyi and Shijing to the Shiji, Kangxi Zidian, and Bencao Gangmu, as well as extensive use of French sinological scholarship by Remusat, Julien, Biot, and others. His lexicographic works — particularly the Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1874), which covered 12,527 characters with pronunciations in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, and Shanghainese — were praised as the finest Chinese-English dictionaries of their era. The Dutch sinologist Groeneveldt recommended that “every student of Chinese should buy this dictionary first, even if he already owns others.”

Williams’s intellectual engagement with Chinese thought deserves particular attention. His assessment of Confucius in The Middle Kingdom was remarkably penetrating:

The greatest characteristic of Confucius’s philosophy is obedience to one’s superiors, and a gentle, upright manner of dealing with one’s peers. His philosophy requires people to seek their guiding constraints in the real world, not from an invisible deity, and the monarch need only obey a higher judge within very limited bounds. Starting from the duty, honor, and obedience of children toward parents, Confucius then instilled the duties of wife to husband, subject to ruler, minister to sovereign, and other social obligations. Confucius believed that political integrity must be built on personal uprightness; in his view, all progress begins with “knowing thyself.” Without doubt, many of his ideas are worthy of praise. Compared even with the teachings of Greek and Roman sages, his works are in no way inferior, and in two respects they are greatly superior: the wide application of his philosophy to his own society, and its outstanding practical character.

Williams also recognized, with unusual acuity for his time, the enduring influence of Confucianism on Chinese psychological and cultural structures, and attributed this durability to the Chinese reverence for education — a phenomenon he traced back to institutions described in the Liji (Book of Rites) and found to be “far superior to anything contemporary Jewish, Persian, or Syrian civilizations had achieved.”

The missionary period produced a constellation of scholars whose works, though individually less monumental than Williams’s, collectively built American knowledge of China:

Justus Doolittle (1824–1880), an American Board missionary based in Fuzhou, produced Social Life of the Chinese (1867), a detailed ethnographic study based on extensive fieldwork and personal participation in local customs. His chapters on the Chinese examination system were praised as more thorough than Williams’s treatment of the same subject.

William Alexander Parsons Martin (1827–1916), a Presbyterian missionary who became president of the Tongwen Guan (the Qing government’s school for foreign languages), founded the Peking Oriental Society in 1885 and published extensively on Chinese law, government, and intellectual change. His final work, The Awakening of China (1907), drew on decades of firsthand observation to describe China’s transformation under Western influence.

Arthur Henderson Smith (1845–1932) published Chinese Characteristics (1890), a widely read and controversial analysis of Chinese national character, and China in Convulsion (1902), a detailed account of the Boxer Uprising that remains a valuable primary source.

William Woodville Rockhill (1854–1914), an American diplomat rather than a missionary, made two solo journeys into Tibet and published The Land of Lamas (1891) and other works that significantly expanded Western knowledge of Tibet. His translation of William of Rubruck’s thirteenth-century travel account (1900) and his collaborative work with Friedrich Hirth on Zhao Rugua’s Zhu Fan Zhi (1911) demonstrated the range of his scholarship.

The most important American sinologist of the early twentieth century was not born in America and was not a missionary. Berthold Laufer (1874–1934), born in Cologne and trained in Germany, arrived in the United States in 1898 and spent his career at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He brought to American sinology the philological rigor and encyclopedic learning of the continental European tradition.

Laufer’s masterpiece was Sino-Iranica (1919), a monumental study of material-cultural exchange between China and Iran, particularly the transmission of plant and animal species. A reviewer in the Journal Asiatique praised it as “the most thorough work we possess on this subject,” noting that Laufer “used an extraordinarily rich body of Chinese literature, compared it with Indo-European sources, and made careful and correct identifications of numerous trees, fruits, and plants, correcting errors that had become common knowledge.”

Laufer also published Chinese Pottery of the Han Dynasty (1909), the first Western study of Chinese ceramics, which the French sinologist Chavannes praised for its originality and insight, even while questioning whether all the pottery was genuinely Han-period. As David Honey observed, Laufer was “the only eminent American sinologist of his generation, even if German-born and trained.”

Looking back over the period from 1830 to 1920, the most important American scholars of China were Bridgman, Williams, Martin, Doolittle, Rockhill, Smith, and Laufer. All except Rockhill (a diplomat) and Laufer (a pure scholar) were missionaries. The dominance of missionary sinology gave American China scholarship two distinctive characteristics: a preponderance of language-learning tools (dictionaries, grammars, textbooks) reflecting the practical needs of missionary work, and a tradition of comprehensive, encyclopedic surveys aimed at educating the American public about China.

3. Friedrich Hirth at Columbia: The German Transplant

The transition from missionary to professional sinology in America was symbolized — and partly accomplished — by the arrival of Friedrich Hirth (1845–1927) at Columbia University. Hirth, born in Grafentonna in Thuringia, was Germany’s senior sinologist. He had spent twenty-five years (1870–1895) in various official capacities in China, including as Commissioner of Customs, studying with local scholars at each posting and building up a formidable personal library. He was regarded as “the doyen of German sinologists” and was elected to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1897.

Hirth’s academic career in Germany was, however, frustrated by the political dynamics of Berlin sinological circles. When the University of Berlin sought to establish its first chair of sinology in 1912, Hirth was unavailable: he had already accepted a professorship at Columbia after his reputation had been damaged by a public quarrel with the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen. As Henri Cordier lamented, Richthofen’s “influence on the sinological studies so flourishing in Germany today certainly had been nefast during several years in discouraging the ambition of men of true knowledge such as Friedrich Hirth.”

Hirth served at Columbia from 1902 to 1917, during which time he published his lecture notes as The Ancient History of China to the End of the Chou Dynasty (1908) and continued his research on Sino-Western commercial relations. His appointment brought European philological standards to American sinology and established Columbia as one of the first American universities to offer serious academic instruction in Chinese studies. It also demonstrated a pattern that would recur throughout the twentieth century: American sinology’s enrichment through the recruitment of European-trained scholars.

Yale’s tradition of Chinese studies, inaugurated by Williams’s appointment in 1877, was continued by Kenneth Scott Latourette, a historian who published The History of Early Relations between the United States and China, 1784–1844 (1917) and The Development of China (1917). The latter became the first — and arguably the most successful — textbook on China for American college students, praised for its clarity and widely adopted for decades.

4. The Institutional Transition and the Rise of Professional Sinology

If the Institute of Pacific Relations marked the beginning of the transition toward area studies, the founding of the Far Eastern Association in 1941 represented its institutional culmination. Led by Fairbank and a group of like-minded scholars, the Association was established as a purely American scholarly organization, distinct from the internationally oriented IPR. It received substantial support from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and, after 1948, became one of the most important institutions for the study of China in the United States. In 1956, it was renamed the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), and its journal, originally the Far Eastern Quarterly, became the Journal of Asian Studies — the most influential English-language periodical for Asian studies, which it remains today.

The development of American China studies in the early 1950s was severely disrupted by McCarthyism. A number of China specialists were persecuted for alleged Communist sympathies; the IPR itself was forced to dissolve under political pressure. The accusation that American China scholars had “lost China” by providing insufficiently anti-Communist analysis became a potent weapon in domestic political battles. Normal scholarly research was impeded, and many promising careers were damaged or destroyed.

However, McCarthyism proved to be a temporary interruption. By the mid-1950s, the failures of the Korean War and of the policy of isolating New China had convinced American policymakers of the need for better understanding of Chinese affairs. Paradoxically, the very hostility that McCarthyism had directed at China scholars ultimately generated increased government support for China studies, as the strategic imperative of “knowing the enemy” outweighed ideological suspicion of the scholars who possessed that knowledge.

5. The Fairbank Revolution: Area Studies and Modern China

The transformation of American sinology from a predominantly humanistic enterprise focused on classical civilization to a social-scientific one oriented toward contemporary policy concerns began in the 1920s. A key institutional catalyst was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), founded in 1925 in Hawaii by businessmen, educators, and religious leaders concerned with social and economic issues in the Pacific region. The IPR’s research priorities — population, agriculture, industrialization, colonial institutions, nationalist movements, international political relations — reflected the practical concerns of an America increasingly entangled in Asian affairs. The IPR published two important journals, Pacific Affairs and Far Eastern Survey, and it was estimated that half of all American books on Asia published before the 1950s were either produced or funded by the Institute.

No individual has exerted a greater influence on the institutional development of American China scholarship than John King Fairbank (1907–1991). Born in South Dakota, Fairbank graduated from Harvard in 1929 and went to Oxford to pursue a doctorate, studying under the British historian of China’s foreign relations, H.B. Morse. Fairbank chose the Chinese maritime customs system as his dissertation topic, thereby establishing a research orientation — toward modern Chinese diplomatic and institutional history — that was “completely different from traditional sinology, with its focus on philological and documentary analysis of ancient Chinese history and culture. It was an entirely new experiment.”

After receiving his Oxford doctorate in 1936, Fairbank returned to Harvard, where he would remain for over four decades. In 1937, he offered for the first time a course on “Far Eastern History since 1793” — a landmark in the American academy. The following year he introduced a research seminar using Qing-dynasty documentary sources. These courses represented a decisive break with the traditional European model of sinology: instead of centering on classical texts and philological analysis, Fairbank’s approach focused on modern China and employed the methods of the social sciences.

Fairbank’s career was shaped by direct involvement in wartime intelligence and diplomacy. From 1941, he served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later as special assistant to the American ambassador in China (1942–1943); in 1945–1946, he directed the United States Information Service in China. These experiences gave him firsthand knowledge of Chinese society during a period of revolutionary upheaval and convinced him that American understanding of China was dangerously inadequate.

Upon returning to Harvard in 1946, Fairbank immediately set about creating a new institutional framework for the study of China. He established the National and Area Studies program, personally directing a regional studies plan for China and its periphery. In 1955, he arranged the creation of two research projects at Harvard — “Modern Chinese Political Institutions” and “Modern Chinese Economic Institutions” — that laid the groundwork for the formal establishment of the East Asian Research Center at Harvard in 1956. Fairbank served as the Center’s first director for twenty years.

The “area studies” model that Fairbank championed possessed several distinctive features. First, it focused on modern and contemporary China, serving practical policy needs. Second, it emphasized social-scientific training — political science, economics, sociology, anthropology — alongside language skills. Third, it encouraged interdisciplinary research, breaking down the boundaries between traditional academic departments. As Fairbank himself summarized, area studies represented “the combination of traditional sinology with the social sciences.”

The institutional impact was enormous. Between 1955 and 1975, Harvard’s East Asian Research Center trained approximately two hundred researchers and students, awarded over sixty doctoral degrees in East Asian history and languages, and supported an additional 275 doctorates in other departments. By the 1970s, scholars who had received their East Asian training at Harvard occupied positions at seventy to eighty American universities. One assessment compared Fairbank’s scholarly empire to France’s Annales school in its scope and influence.

Fairbank’s model was rapidly replicated across the American university system, generously funded by the federal government and private foundations. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 mandated the establishment of foreign language and area studies centers at major universities. Between 1959 and 1970, the federal government allocated over fifteen million dollars specifically for China studies. Simultaneously, private foundations — particularly the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation — contributed approximately twenty-six million dollars, with an additional three million directed to Chinese studies programs in Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. In total, American public and private investment in China studies during this period reached approximately seventy million dollars — a nineteen-fold increase over the preceding thirteen years.

The Ford Foundation played a particularly important role, not only providing funding but actively encouraging the creation of coordinating bodies. In June 1959, with Ford support, the Joint Committee on Contemporary China (JCCC) was established under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. The JCCC funded 533 China-related research projects between 1961 and 1970, of which 472 (88%) were historical in nature. Ford also supported the creation of China studies centers at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington in Seattle, and subsequently at Yale, Michigan, Princeton, Cornell, and Stanford.

6. Three Paradigms: Impact-Response, Tradition-Modernity, and Imperialism

From the end of the Second World War through the late 1960s, American China studies were broadly dominated by three analytical frameworks, each reflecting particular assumptions about the relationship between China and the West.

Fairbank’s own “impact-response” model was the most influential. He argued that Chinese civilization, for all its achievements, was fundamentally static, locked into a self-reinforcing system in which “the magnificent conception of Confucian orthodoxy united morality and politics, fusing social order with cosmic order.” The Confucian system maintained imperial stability but also produced “a powerful inertia that suppressed reform, making Chinese revolutionary change convulsive, sometimes internally repressed, sometimes destructive.”

What force could break this traditional order? For Fairbank, the answer was “the impact of the West.” His landmark collaborative work with Deng Siyu, China’s Response to the West (1954), offered the paradigmatic formulation:

Since China is the most populous unified state, with the longest continuous history, its subjection to Western ravages in the past century has necessarily produced continuous, surging intellectual revolutions whose end we have not yet seen… Under the impetus of the industrial revolution, this contact had a disastrously heavy impact on the old Chinese society, challenging, attacking, and undermining its foundations in every domain of social activity — political, economic, social, ideological, and cultural — and ultimately conquering it.

The “Harvard school,” as Fairbank’s followers were known, became the dominant force in American China studies. Its influence was both scholarly and institutional: through his teaching, his editorial projects (including the multi-volume Cambridge History of China), and his role as a public intellectual, Fairbank shaped American understanding of modern China for half a century.

Joseph R. Levenson (1920–1969), based at the University of California at Berkeley, represented an alternative tradition. His major works — Liang Chi-chao and the Mind of Modern China (1953) and the three-volume Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (1958–1968) — developed what became known as the “tradition-modernity” model. Levenson argued that Chinese civilization before the nineteenth-century Western impact existed in a state of harmonious, balanced stagnation. Confucian humanism could only produce “a fixed, static world order, fundamentally incompatible with the modern society governed by scientific reason.” Fundamental change could not arise from within Chinese society but only from external stimulation. Confucianism, in Levenson’s memorable phrase, had “only a way back, but no way out.”

Where Fairbank focused primarily on political history, Levenson concentrated on intellectual history. Both shared the assumption that China was essentially a “stagnant” society requiring Western catalysis for modernization, but Levenson brought to this assumption a deeper emotional engagement: he genuinely admired ancient Chinese civilization and mourned its decline.

A third paradigm, the “imperialism” model, dominated the study of Chinese economic history. Scholars working within this framework regarded imperialism as the primary driver of modern Chinese change, particularly in economic development.

Despite their differences in emphasis, all three paradigms shared fundamental assumptions. All viewed Chinese society as essentially “stagnant” before Western contact. All regarded cultural and value differences as the root cause of Sino-Western conflict. All used Western standards of development as universal measures of progress. And all, in various ways, assumed that “any important change in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China could only have been caused by Western impact or constituted a response to it. This effectively excluded any possibility of a truly China-centered approach to modern Chinese history.”

The dominance of these three models during the 1950s and 1960s was intimately connected to the historical moment. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American influence in international affairs expanded dramatically. The “loss” of China to communism in 1949 made the study of China an urgent matter of national security. The three paradigms, whatever their scholarly merits, conveniently supported American Cold War assumptions about the superiority of Western values and the inevitability of Western-style modernization.

7. The “China-Centered” Turn

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, both domestic and international developments had undermined the intellectual foundations of the three dominant paradigms. The Vietnam War, the Iranian hostage crisis, the civil rights movement, and Watergate shook American confidence in the country’s capacity to “lead” the world and in the universal applicability of Western values. Anti-colonial movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America demonstrated that non-Western societies possessed their own dynamics of historical development.

A younger generation of American China scholars began to question whether it was valid to define only the Euro-American capitalist system as a rational social structure and to treat China merely as a passive “object” of Western influence and reform. The search for a new approach culminated in what Paul Cohen, in his influential study Discovering History in China (1984), called the “China-centered” orientation.

The “China-centered” approach was inaugurated by Philip Kuhn’s Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China (1970), which examined the dynamics of militia organization and local defense in the late Qing period without reference to Western impact as the primary causal factor. This was followed by a series of major works: Frederic Wakeman and Carolyn Grant’s Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (1975), G. William Skinner’s The City in Late Imperial China (1977), and Jonathan Spence and John Wills’s From Ming to Ch’ing (1979).

These works shared several characteristics, as Cohen identified: they approached Chinese history from within China rather than from the perspective of the West; they disaggregated China “horizontally” into regions, provinces, and localities to pursue regional and local history; they divided Chinese society “vertically” into different social strata, promoting the writing of lower-class history; and they enthusiastically adopted theories, methods, and techniques from disciplines beyond history — primarily the social sciences — and sought to integrate them with historical analysis.

8. Fairbank’s Scholarly Achievement

Fairbank was extraordinarily productive. He authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited more than sixty books, together with numerous articles and reviews. His scholarly output fell into four categories: specialized academic monographs, of which Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 (based on his Oxford dissertation and drawing extensively on Chinese archival sources) was the most distinguished; bibliographic guides and documentary surveys, such as Modern China: A Bibliographical Guide to Chinese Works, 1898–1937 (with Liu Guangjing); works of public education about China and Sino-American relations, of which The United States and China (1948; five editions through 1989) was the most widely read; and policy-oriented essays on contemporary Sino-American relations. He also co-edited the multi-volume Cambridge History of China.

Two characteristics distinguished Fairbank’s scholarship. First, his commitment to what might be called “applied history” — the conviction that historical research should inform contemporary policy. This was rooted in his wartime experience: having witnessed the corruption and inefficiency of the Nationalist government firsthand, Fairbank felt a scholarly obligation to educate the American public about China. The United States and China, which went through five editions and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, was his most direct expression of this conviction.

Second, Fairbank pioneered the use of Chinese archival sources for the study of modern Chinese history. Previous Western scholars of China’s foreign relations — Morse, Cordier, Dennett — had relied almost exclusively on Western archival materials, dismissing Chinese sources as unreliable. Fairbank was among the first scholars to access the newly opened Qing palace archives in Beijing in 1932, and his doctoral monograph was built substantially on Chinese documentary evidence. As his student Yi Laoluo (Lloyd Eastman) recalled: “For him and for his students, late Qing documents were not merely a source of information about the Chinese political system. They were also a window into another world, where one could observe the lively human characteristics and the distinctive worldview of late nineteenth-century Chinese officials.”

Fairbank’s most consequential achievement was arguably institutional rather than scholarly. Before 1940, the United States lacked any established tradition of East Asian studies: there were perhaps fifty professional scholars of East Asia in the entire country, and no American university offered a serious program in modern Chinese history. By the time Fairbank retired in 1977, scholars trained at Harvard alone occupied positions at scores of American universities. The Harvard East Asian Research Center, renamed the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research upon his retirement, became and remained the “flagship” of American China studies.

Fairbank’s institutional vision was informed by a clear understanding of what distinguished American from European sinology. Where European sinology was rooted in philological traditions maintained by senior professors occupying endowed chairs of ancient pedigree, American Chinese studies would be interdisciplinary, policy-relevant, and institutionally diffuse. Courses on China would be offered not only in departments of East Asian languages and literatures but in departments of history, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, law, art, and music — a vision that was realized during Fairbank’s lifetime and that remains the defining characteristic of American Chinese studies today.

Several of Fairbank’s works merit closer examination for the light they shed on his scholarly method and the evolution of American China studies.

Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (1953), based on his Oxford dissertation, was a meticulous study of the treaty port system from 1842 to 1854, grounded in extensive use of both Chinese and Western archival sources. The work established Fairbank’s reputation as a historian of the first rank and demonstrated that the study of modern Chinese history could be as rigorous and source-critical as the philological analysis of classical texts. Cordier’s Bibliotheca Sinica had listed no American work in its first category of comprehensive studies until Williams’s Middle Kingdom; Fairbank’s monograph brought American scholarship in Chinese diplomatic and institutional history to a level that commanded international respect.

The United States and China (1948), written after Fairbank’s return from wartime service, was explicitly designed for a general readership. It offered a panoramic survey of Chinese geography, historical development, social structure, cultural traditions, and the history of Sino-American relations. The book went through five editions (1948, 1958, 1971, 1979, 1989), each updated to reflect the latest developments, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies — making it by far the most widely read American work on China. Fairbank’s ability to combine scholarly authority with accessible prose made the book an effective instrument of public education at a time when American understanding of China was critically inadequate.

The Cambridge History of China, which Fairbank co-edited with Denis Twitchett, was the most ambitious collaborative project in the history of American sinology. Planned as a full multi-volume survey of Chinese history from antiquity to the present, written by an international team of specialists, the series represented the culmination of the institutional infrastructure that Fairbank had spent decades building. It remains the standard English-language reference work for Chinese history.

9. The “Sinology” versus “Chinese Studies” Divide

The Fairbank revolution did not extinguish the older tradition of humanistic sinology in America. Scholars such as Peter Boodberg (1903–1972) and Edward Schafer (1913–1991) at Berkeley, Homer Dubs (1892–1969) at Oxford (though American-born), L. Carrington Goodrich (1894–1986) at Columbia, George A. Kennedy (1901–1960) at Yale, and Francis Cleaves (1911–1995) at Harvard all pursued classical philological work in the European tradition. Many of these scholars, as Honey noted, “were the last of the breed to spring from the missionary heritage of the nineteenth century,” having been born or raised in China as children of missionaries.

The tension between “sinology” (the philological study of classical Chinese civilization through its written records) and “Chinese studies” (the social-scientific study of modern China, often oriented toward policy concerns) has been a persistent feature of the American field. Frederick Mote articulated one pole of this debate: “If it means anything, sinology means Chinese philology.” The other pole was represented by the area studies model, which explicitly sought to move beyond philological research toward the integration of multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Peter Alexis Boodberg, a Russian emigre who taught at Berkeley from 1936 until his death in 1972, represented the most uncompromising defense of philological sinology in America. Honey described him as equaling Pelliot’s “intellectual incisiveness and strength of memory” and exceeding Maspero’s “humanity” in his vision of philology as universal humanism. Boodberg “attempted to add the philologist, in his role as curator of the records of the ages, to the ranks of the philosophers and prophets in seeking the best in the creative spirit and cultural heritage of all nations.”

Yet Boodberg’s influence was limited by his idiosyncratic style — a fondness for coining arcane neologisms that alienated many colleagues — and by the institutional tide running toward social-scientific Chinese studies. His student Edward Schafer, however, succeeded in establishing “a new genre of learned writing” that directed “poetical insight and illustration to concrete manifestations of culture,” producing works on Tang-dynasty material and imaginary worlds that were at once rigorously scholarly and accessible to general readers.

The tension between sinology and Chinese studies has not been resolved; it has merely shifted its institutional locus. As China’s global importance has grown, American universities have invested heavily in Chinese language teaching and in programs oriented toward contemporary Chinese politics, economics, and society. Classical sinology — the study of pre-modern Chinese texts, thought, and culture — has not disappeared, but it occupies a smaller share of institutional resources and scholarly attention than it did in the mid-twentieth century. Some scholars have argued that this shift has impoverished American understanding of China by severing the connection between contemporary analysis and the deep historical and philosophical traditions that continue to shape Chinese civilization. Others contend that the area studies model was a necessary and productive adaptation to the realities of a world in which China’s importance transcends the concerns of classical scholarship.

10. Contemporary American China Studies

Since the 1980s, American China studies have been transformed by several developments. The most consequential was the opening of China itself following the reform era: American scholars gained access to Chinese archives, libraries, and fieldwork sites on an unprecedented scale. By 2003, fifty major American research institutions held nearly 800,000 Chinese-language volumes, together with extensive microfilm, audiovisual, and digital collections. The development of Chinese digital libraries and databases further expanded research possibilities.

The composition of the scholarly community also changed significantly. Increasing numbers of scholars of Chinese origin entered American China studies programs, bringing native-language competence and cultural familiarity. A preliminary survey of 509 American China specialists listed in the Dictionary of North American Sinologists found that 43 (8.5%) were from mainland China — a proportion that has continued to grow. These scholars, though still underrepresented at the most senior levels, have exerted an increasingly important influence on the field.

Institutionally, American China studies have become more diverse. Alongside traditional academic departments (East Asian Languages and Literatures, Asian Studies), research centers, institutes, and interdisciplinary programs now account for more than half of the approximately 250 China-related academic units at American universities. These centers typically do not offer degrees but support lectures, seminars, workshops, publications, and archival initiatives that attract scholars from across the humanities and social sciences. Harvard alone houses more than ten institutions related to China research.

The most significant intellectual development in post-1980 American China studies has been the wholesale importation of social-scientific theoretical frameworks. Three “middle-range theories” have been particularly influential:

Involution theory, borrowed by Philip Huang from Clifford Geertz’s studies of Indonesian agriculture and applied to the Yangzi Delta, posited that Chinese agriculture experienced “growth without development” — increasing labor inputs without proportional increases in per-capita productivity. Prasenjit Duara later modified the concept and applied it to the analysis of North China village governance under the pressure of state-building, coining the term “state involution” to describe the inefficiency of modern rural administration.

Civil society theory, derived from Jurgen Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere,” was applied to Chinese history by William Rowe in his influential studies of Hankou. Rowe argued that Hankou’s merchant organizations — guilds, fire companies, and other civic institutions — possessed characteristics analogous to the Western “public sphere,” functioning autonomously from state control. Though contested, Rowe’s work significantly expanded scholarly understanding of late Qing urban social organization.

Postmodern approaches, influenced by Michel Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment rationality and linear modernization narratives, appeared in American China studies from the early 1990s. Paul Cohen’s History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997) analyzed the Boxer Uprising simultaneously as a historical event, a set of personal experiences (drought, foreign intrusion, collective spirit-possession), and a series of mythological narratives constructed by successive Chinese political movements. Benjamin Elman’s work on Qing intellectual history explicitly rejected teleological connections between Changzhou New Text scholarship and late Qing reform, arguing that such connections were artifacts of modernization theory rather than historical reality. Works employing postmodern methodologies — James Hevia’s Cherishing Men from Afar (1995), Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice (1995), Gail Hershatter’s Dangerous Pleasures (1997) — have received major scholarly awards, reflecting the growing influence of these approaches.

The early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of digital humanities as a significant force in American China studies. Large-scale text databases, geographic information systems, social network analysis tools, and computational text-mining techniques have opened new possibilities for research on Chinese historical and literary sources. While these methods remain controversial — critics argue that they privilege quantifiable patterns over the careful reading of individual texts — they represent a genuinely new development in the methodological toolkit available to China scholars.

11. Conclusion: The Paradox of American Sinology

American sinology’s greatest strength — its institutional scale, its financial resources, its methodological diversity, its engagement with contemporary policy concerns — is also the source of its most persistent tensions. The field’s rapid growth from a handful of missionary scholars to thousands of professionals and students has produced extraordinary breadth of coverage but also, inevitably, a certain thinness. The Fairbank revolution, which democratized Chinese studies by integrating them with the social sciences, simultaneously attenuated the connection between China scholarship and the philological traditions — Chinese and Western — that had sustained sinology for centuries.

The “China-centered” turn of the 1970s represented a genuine intellectual advance, correcting the Eurocentric assumptions of earlier paradigms. Yet the question of what it means to study China “from the inside” remains contested: is it sufficient to apply Western social-scientific theories to Chinese data, or does genuine understanding require a deeper engagement with Chinese intellectual traditions, Chinese languages (classical as well as modern), and Chinese ways of knowing? This question, first posed by Boodberg and Schafer in the 1950s and 1960s, remains as urgent today as it was then.

What is certain is that the scale and diversity of American China studies — the thousands of scholars, the hundreds of institutions, the billions of dollars in cumulative investment — have made the American field the indispensable center of international China scholarship. For better or worse, it is in the American academy that the most consequential debates about how to understand China are now conducted. The challenge for the future is to ensure that this immense apparatus remains capable of the kind of deep, patient, linguistically grounded engagement with Chinese civilization that the best work of every sinological tradition — missionary, philological, and social-scientific — has always demanded.

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References

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