Fairbank, John King (1907-1991)

US historian. He taught at Harvard, created the field of modern Chinese history and became the dean of American Chinese scholars. His more than two dozen books include The United States and China (1948) and China: A New History (1992).

He was born in Huron, South Dakota and, after graduating from Harvard, he spent six years travelling in China, teaching himself Chinese in order to read the country's 19th-century archives. At Harvard, he developed a pioneering modern East Asian history programme with his colleague Edwin O Reischauer and directed the East Asian Research Center. A target of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist hearings in the 1950s, he went on to become a leading advocate of normalizing relations with communist China in the 1960s.