Harvard sinologist whose Origins of the Cultural Revolution trilogy and Mao’s Last Revolution dissected China’s elite politics
A journalist in London through 1961 who covered Chinese developments from afar, he first reached mainland China only in 1972; he went on to study elite Chinese politics from the founding of the People's Republic through the Cultural Revolution.
A Briton born in India, he was a journalist and a Labour MP before becoming a scholar, and founded and edited The China Quarterly. The three volumes of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (1974–1997) traced the line struggles inside the top leadership from the Hundred Flowers of 1956 to 1966, showing the Cultural Revolution as the outcome of political conflicts accumulated since the failure of the Great Leap rather than a personal whim of Mao. Mao’s Last Revolution (2006, with Michael Schoenhals) is the standard narrative of 1966–1976. He was a professor at Harvard and director of its Fairbank Center.
Also known as: Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar
Activities and affiliations
-
–1981
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1974–1979Labour MP for Belper
- 1984–2019Professor of government, Harvard University
Related historical events
- 1956–1957From the Hundred Flowers to the Anti-Rightist CampaignAuthor of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 1Analysed the leadership conflicts of 1956–1957 as the starting point of the Cultural Revolution.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionAuthor of Mao’s Last RevolutionWrote the standard narrative of 1966–1976.
Founding and Editing The China Quarterly, 1959–1968
In early 1959, at the age of 28, MacFarquhar was invited by Walter Laqueur, editor of Soviet Survey, to launch The China Quarterly. Laqueur had been impressed by an article MacFarquhar contributed to a special issue of Soviet Survey on China's Hundred Flowers Campaign and, judging that Communist China warranted a journal of its own, asked him to serve as founding editor. Preparing the first issue, which appeared in 1960, MacFarquhar travelled to leading China specialists in Europe and the United States to learn the state of the field and solicit manuscripts. At the time, however, very few specialists had serious knowledge of post-1949 China, and fewer still were writing research articles suitable for an academic journal.
For that inaugural issue MacFarquhar filled the gap with informed insiders. He commissioned former and serving government officials to write brief overviews of the first decade of the People's Republic; the lead article came from Howard Boorman, a US Foreign Service officer in Beijing in 1947–50. In his editorial MacFarquhar endorsed Boorman's assessment, declaring that "the present fact of Chinese power is sufficient justification for launching this journal." Consistent with its mission of informing Western intellectuals about developments inside the communist world, each issue carried a Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation section summarizing recent political events.
Across nine years, from 1959 to 1968, he edited the journal's first 33 issues. His successor as editor, David C. Wilson, later summarized the result: The China Quarterly "has established itself as the leading Western journal on developments in and affecting contemporary China." The academic network built during those founding years served MacFarquhar well when, after relinquishing the editorship in 1968, he turned to full-time scholarship.