Speakers:
Holly Fairbank, Executive Director, Maxine Greene Institute for Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination
William Kirby, T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard University; Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Rana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School 
Wang Ruiheng, Associate Professor of History, Nanjing University; Visiting Scholar, Harvard-Yenching Institute
Abraham Zamcheck, Assistant Professor of Archiecture, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Moderator: Dorinda Elliott, Executive Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Introductory Remarks: Nancy Berliner, Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Illustrated with photos from the current exhibit, Once Upon a Time in Peking, four historians will discuss the debates roiling China during John King Fairbank’s time there in the 1930s and 1940s and consider how they might continue to resonate today. For more than 150 years, Chinese intellectuals have grappled with a fundamental question: how can China modernize without giving up its cultural roots?

When Fairbank arrived in Peking in 1932 to pursue his China studies, he found himself in the middle of that debate. What should China adopt from the West? What should it preserve? Amid this thrilling intellectual ferment, Fairbank and his wife Wilma struck up an intense friendship with two U.S.-educated Chinese architects, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, who sought to use Western approaches to preserve ancient Chinese buildings. The Liangs welcomed them into their intellectual salons with some of China’s leading thinkers. That friendship helped inform Fairbank’s understanding of China, contributing to his development as America’s preeminent scholar on contemporary China.

Fairbank returned in 1942 to a very different China. Scholarly debates over the country’s cultural future were eclipsed by the immediacy of war with Japan. The Fairbanks worked at the U.S. embassy in Chongqing, promoting cultural exchanges. Their dear friends were now living in squalor, decamped far from the frontlines to a village in Sichuan. In the midst of war, China was forging a new place in the world, witnessing a rise of nationalism that would reshape the country.

Our speakers will discuss the Fairbanks’ China and along the way, look at the questions—What is the essence of China? What is China’s role in the world?—that seem as important today as they were almost a century ago.