Foreword to the Chinese Version of A. Doak Barnett’s China’s Far West: Four Decades of Change

Abstract

A. Doak Barnett, John K. Fairbank, and Robert Scalapino are together called the “Big Three” among America’s Sinologists in the Directory of American Sinologists published in the 1980s. Luckily enough, I got to know all the three of them at around the same time 17 years ago. At the end of 1981, I was invited by Professor Scalapino to be a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute of East Asian Studies of the University of California at Berkeley. That was my first trip to the United States. The next year, during a visit to Harvard University, I dropped by Professor Fairbank’s house. He showed me a room on the second floor of his house and said, “This is the room where your teacher Professor Ch’ien Tuan Sheng lived when he taught at Harvard from 1947 to 1948.” Later, I went to Washington and met Barnett at the Institute of Advanced International Studies (IAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University. At that time, he had just taken up a teaching post there after having been a Foreign Policy Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute.