ABSTRACT
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 i f 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."
