Early one morning in the summer of 1972, John King Fairbank, my
senior colleague among Harvard's East Asia faculty at the time,
phoned to ask if I would look over a draft article for Foreign
Affairs summing up his first trip to China since the 1940s. The piece
was fairly indulgent toward Mao's regime. Over lunch that day, I said
to Fairbank, "This trip to China must have been moving." He nodded
and said, "Well, you know, I've been on their side ever since 1943."
In Fairbank's draft I queried the sentence: "The Maoist revolution is
on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people
in many centuries." The dean of American Sinology, to whom I owe
much, stuck with it. But he added the words: "At least, most Chinese
seem now to believe so, and it will be hard to prove otherwise."
During the first decades of Mao's China, a time of American
self-confidence and strong sense of purpose spurred by the World War
II victory, U.S. Sinology for the most part took on an "idealist"
rather than a "realist" orientation: hopeful about social progress,
benevolent in its view of human nature, open to strong leadership.
Since America was the chief bastion outside China of contemporary
China studies, this buoyant, progressive mindset influenced the
worldwide image of Mao Zedong. True, during the first years after
1949 Mao was viewed in a totalitarian framework as a junior Stalin,
but within a decade this view gave way to a more open-minded one of
the Chinese leader as a flexible Asian communist. The Sino-Soviet
split in the early 1960s and the subsequent Nixon opening to China of
1971-72 further softened Mao's image.
