by Jane Perlez
Feb. 12, 2019
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| Roderick MacFarquhar in 2012. Photo: Nora Tam / South China Morning Post, via Getty images |
BEIJING — Roderick MacFarquhar, a consummate scholar of Communist China whose writing on Mao’s power politics influenced how people around the world understood China, died on Sunday in Cambridge, Mass., where he had long taught at Harvard University. He was 88.
His son, Rory, said the cause was heart failure.
Professor MacFarquhar specialized in the origins of the Cultural Revolution, the decade of turmoil that terrorized China beginning in 1966. His three-volume work, “The Origins of the Cultural Revolution,” came to be considered a classic.
The research for those books, which were based on dense official texts, public speeches and Mao’s own words, opened a world hidden to the West and illuminated an era of China’s past that still seems almost unfathomable.
At Harvard, Professor MacFarquhar taught history and political science, and was known there for his wit and informality. In one class he asked his teaching assistants to pose as Red Guards, Mao’s paramilitary youth, and act out boisterous self-criticism sessions. He then coaxed the class to shout over and over, “Mao Zedong, Wan Sui!” — “10,000 years for Mao!” — so that everyone felt the fervor of the movement that shook China. The “CultRev” class packed the biggest lecture hall on campus.
“Rod was a thinker — he studied big questions, and big ideas,” said Minxin Pei, a historian on China and one of his early students. “He was very interested in political purges, and the Cultural Revolution was one of the biggest political purges ever.”
Unlike many historians who dwelled on the violence of the Red Guards after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Professor MacFarquhar concentrated on the elite factional fighting that started in the 1950s.
He had worked as a journalist and served as a member of Parliament in Britain for five years in the 1970s, jobs that instructed him in the workings of politics.
By concentrating on Mao’s brutal political chess-playing, Mr. Pei said, Professor MacFarquhar helped illustrate the leader’s state of mind and laid bare the calamity of the Cultural Revolution, which nearly ruined the country.
Though his work put China under hard scrutiny, and though he made clear that he thought some kind of democracy was best for the country, Professor MacFarquhar was not viewed as aiming to undermine the Communist Party.
He was able to keep contact with his peers in China, including academics and editors of the official government newspaper, People’s Daily, when they visited the United States and streamed into his Harvard office, said Michael A. Szonyi, director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, with which Professor MacFarquhar was long affiliated.
One Chinese professor, Tang Shaojie of Tsinghua University, who attended Professor MacFarquhar’s lectures at Harvard in 2003, called him a “giant” in the study of Chinese history and noted that the study of the Cultural Revolution for many years had occurred outside China.
“And where was it studied? In the United States,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “Specifically at Harvard University. And more specifically by Professor MacFarquhar.”
Professor MacFarquhar was never barred from visiting China, though on one occasion he surprised his hosts at the Central Party School of the Communist Party by devoting his talk to sensitive topics.
“Today I am going to talk about two dates, May 4 and June 4,” he told the audience, who froze in silence, according to Mr. Pei. On May 4, 1919, students took to the streets of Beijing to denounce the government as unpatriotic. On June 4, 1989, troops who had shot their way into downtown Beijing broke up student protests at Tiananmen Square, leaving hundreds dead and thousands injured. After the lecture, his hosts calmly took Professor MacFarquhar to dinner, though they did not discuss the lecture, Mr. Pei said.
Professor MacFarquhar was director of the Fairbank Center from 1986 to 1992, and again from 2005 to 2006. Under his watch, the center attracted a diverse set of people curious about China — businessmen, diplomats, journalists — who sought debate as well as scholarship as an avenue to understanding a country that was increasingly important to the United States.
After the 1989 crackdown, he accepted Wang Dan, the student who had led the protests on Tiananmen Square, to study at the Fairbank Center.
He was “my doctoral tutor, my closest teacher, the West’s authoritative voice on the study of China’s Cultural Revolution,” Professor Wang said on Monday.
The Chinese government allowed the first two volumes of Professor MacFarquhar’s Cultural Revolution trilogy, covering 1956-1957 and 1958-60, to be translated into Chinese for publication in China in the 1980s.
By the time the last volume, covering 1961-66, came out in English in the late 1990s, the political atmosphere had soured in the aftermath of the Tiananmen protests, and the book never went to press in China.
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar was born on Dec. 2, 1930, in Lahore, then a major city in British-ruled India, the son of Sir Alexander and Berenice (Whitburn) MacFarquhar. His father was a member of the British Indian Civil Service.
Roderick made a first, fleeting trip to China at age 7 — visiting a snow-clad Great Wall — when he accompanied his parents on a round-the-world ship voyage. He went to a Scottish boarding school and graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Keble College, Oxford University, in 1953.
Wanting to be a journalist, he briefly worked at The Telegraph of London. But to do well in journalism he believed he needed a specialty.
From his childhood, he knew a lot about India, and that seemed an obvious choice. However, “I felt too many people knew about it,” he said in an interview in 2017 posted by the University of Cambridge in England on its website.
The Communist revolution had recently occurred in China. “People would need to know about that,” he said, “so I would learn about China.”
He never, he said, “had a misty feeling about Ming vases or anything like that.”
Professor MacFarquhar became affiliated with the Fairbank Center after its founder, Professor John K. Fairbank, had in 1955 started taking a handful of students to study Chinese language, history and politics.
After receiving his master’s degree in East Asian studies that year, Professor MacFarquhar went on to write his first book, on Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign of the mid-1950s, which had given intellectuals a brief period of greater freedom.
In 1960 he founded The China Quarterly, an academic journal on Chinese politics and economics published by the University of Cambridge. He briefly merged his two passions, politics and China, with a trip to China in 1972 as part of the entourage of the British foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home.
He was elected to Parliament as a Labour candidate in 1974 but was defeated in Margaret Thatcher’s conservative tide of 1979. He joined the Harvard faculty about five years later.
He died in a Cambridge hospital. In addition to his son, Rory, who is director of global economic policy at Google, Professor MacFarquhar is survived by his wife, Dalena Wright; a daughter, Larissa MacFarquhar, a writer for The New Yorker; and two granddaughters. His first wife, Emily Jane (Cohen) MacFarquhar, a journalist, died in 2001.
Professor MacFarquhar had in the last several years turned to writing a book on India. But he was always asked about China and its future. One thing seemed certain, he said: The Communist Party will not last forever.
“I do foresee the Communist Party fading,” he said in the 2017 interview. “How it will happen I’ve not got the slightest idea. The idea that the party knows best, and only the party can rule, I think it will disappear. Whether it will disappear by some kind of new revolution or just gradually fade away, I don’t know.”
Chris Buckley contributed reporting; Luz Ding contributed research
[Ed.] Roderick was the nephew of British jazz and cabaret singer Gery Scott, whom I worked with for many years from 1987 to 2005 (her passing). There are several articles about Gery on this forum. I met Roderick when he visited Canberra in November 2005. He was charming and great fun. He was also the father of The New Yorker journalist Larissa MacFarquhar. I met Larissa in May 2003 when she also visited Canberra to write a feature article on her “Great Aunt Diana” (Gery Scott) for The New Yorker, entitled The Jazz Singer. She also reported on Gery’s stunning performance at the 2003 Sydney Cabaret Convention, which included myself on piano, Scott Dodd on bass and Nick McBride on drums. Dr David Schwartz’s review of that concert is also on this forum, here. - Tony Magee
Obituary originally published in The New York Times, Feb 12, 2019.
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