Roderick MacFarquhar
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Roderick MacFarquhar | |
---|---|
Member of Parliament for Belper | |
In office 28 February 1974 – 7 April 1979 | |
Preceded by | Geoffrey Stewart-Smith |
Succeeded by | Sheila Faith |
Personal details | |
Born | Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar 2 December 1930 British India |
Died | 10 February 2019 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. | (aged 88)
Political party | Labour (before 1981) |
Other political affiliations | SDP (1980s) |
Spouses | Emily Cohen
(m. 1964; died 2001)Dalena Wright (m. 2012) |
Children | 2, including Oxford University |
Main interests | Modern Chinese history |
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar (2 December 1930 – 10 February 2019) was a British China scholar, politician, and journalist.
MacFarquhar was founding editor of
Family and early life
MacFarquhar was born in Lahore, British India (now Pakistan). His father was Sir Alexander MacFarquhar, a member of the Indian Civil Service and later a senior diplomat at the United Nations. His mother was Berenice (née Whitburn). He was educated at the Aitchison College in Lahore and Fettes College, an independent school in Edinburgh.[2]
Academic and journalistic career
After spending part of his
He worked as a journalist on the staff of the
Political career
In the 1966 general election, MacFarquhar fought the Ealing South constituency for the Labour Party but failed to dislodge the sitting Conservative MP. Two years later, he was Labour candidate who attempted to retain the Meriden seat in a by-election; he was on the wrong end of an 18.4% swing at the height of the Wilson government's unpopularity.
Following the defeat of George Brown in 1970 and favourable boundary changes, MacFarquhar was selected to fight the Belper constituency, and at the February 1974 general election succeeded in winning the seat from its sitting Conservative MP Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. Although he won, there was an estimated swing of 4% to the Conservatives had the same boundaries applied in the previous election.
MacFarquhar proved a moderate figure, in line with Brown's views. He abstained on a vote to remove the disqualification of left-wing Labour councillors in
After Parliament
In 1978 MacFarquhar resigned his office as PPS after voting against the Government. In that year, he became a Governor of the
He remained involved in politics and his moderate beliefs made him increasingly uncomfortable in the Labour Party: on 22 October 1981 he announced that he had joined the Social Democratic Party. He fought the South Derbyshire seat, which contained most of then-abolished Belper, for the SDP in the 1983 general election, and nearly succeeded in beating the Labour candidate, although the seat was easily won by the Conservatives.
Subsequent academic career
He was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. in 1980-81 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1986. In 1980–1983, he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow from 1980 until 1983.
In 1986–1992, MacFarquhar was Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.[4] He was a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at Harvard in 1993–1994. He was the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science, Emeritus.
He was a scholar of Chinese politics from the founding of the
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Roderick MacFarquhar, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 140+ works in 330+ publications in 11 languages and 15,700+ library holdings[5]
Personal life
MacFarquhar married Emily Cohen, a journalist and East Asian studies scholar, in 1964. They had two children, the writer Larissa MacFarquhar and economist Rory MacFarquhar, who served as policy adviser in the Obama administration.[6] His first wife died in 2001. He married his second wife, British foreign policy scholar Dalena Wright, in 2012.[7]
MacFarquhar died from heart failure at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 10 February 2019, at age 88.[8][9]
Bibliography
Books
- The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese intellectuals. 1960.
- China Under Mao: Politics Takes Command (1963)
- Chinese ambitions and British policy Fabian tract (1966)
- Sino-American Relations: 1949-1971 (1972)
- The Forbidden City (1972)
- The Origins of the Cultural Revolution - 1. Contradictions Among the People, 1956-1957 (1974)
- The Origins of the Cultural Revolution - 2. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960 (1983)
- The People's Republic: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949-1965 (1987)
- The Politics of China, 1949-1989 (1993)
- Towards a New World Order (1993)
- The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (1997)
- The Origins of the Cultural Revolution - 3. The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-1966 (1997)
- The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms (1999)
- ISBN 9780674023321.
- The Politics of China: Sixty Years of The People's Republic of China (2011)
Book reviews
Year | Review article | Work(s) reviewed |
---|---|---|
2007 | MacFarquhar, Roderick (28 June 2007). "Mission to Mao". The New York Review of Books. 54 (11): 67–71. | MacMillan, Margaret (2007). Nixon and Mao : the week that changed the world. Random House. |
Notes
- ^ Zheng, William (12 February 2019). "Roderick MacFarquhar: leading historian of the Cultural Revolution". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
- ^ Brown, Kerry (20 February 2019). "Roderick MacFarquhar obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
- ^ "Roderick MacFarquhar, journalist and politician who became a China scholar, dies at 88". The Washington Post. Retrieved 7 November 2021.
- ^ Suleski, Ronald Stanley. (2005). The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, p. 77.
- ^ WorldCat Identities: Macfarqhar, Roderick, Worldcat.org
- ^ "In memoriam: Roderick Lemonde Macfarquhar". The China Quarterly. 238. June 2019. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
- ^ Brown, Kerry (20 February 2019). "Roderick Macfarquhar obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
- ^ "Roderick MacFarquhar, Former Director of the Fairbank Center, 1930-2019". 11 February 2019. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
- ^ Perlez, Jane (12 February 2019). "Roderick MacFarquhar, Eminent China Scholar, Dies at 88". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 March 2021.
References
- Suleski, Ronald Stanley. (2005). The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University: a Fifty Year History, 1955-2005. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780976798002; OCLC 64140358
External links
- Roderick MacFarquhar, journalist and politician who became a China scholar, dies at 88 Washington Post, 12 February 2019
- Roderick MacFarquhar, Eminent China Scholar, Dies at 88 New York Times, 12 February 2019
- Roderick MacFarquhar obituary The Guardian, 20 February 2019
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Roderick MacFarquhar
- Home page at Harvard.
- MacFarquhar's reviews for The New York Review of Books.
- Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 6 April and 16 June 2017 (video)