Roderick MacFarquhar: the scholar who wrote the leading history of China’s Cultural Revolution as it happened
- Academic community bids farewell to British professor with a pragmatic and profound understanding of China’s past and present ties to the rest of the world
Professor Roderick MacFarquhar, a prominent Western specialist on China, particularly the Cultural Revolution, died on Sunday. He was 88.
Harvard University’s Fairbank Centre for China Studies, where MacFarquhar was director from 1986-1992, described him as a “great scholar and great man”.
The centre, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the family of the late British scholar and politician would hold a private memorial ceremony, and a public commemoration would be organised “in due course”.
MacFarquhar is best known for his works on China under the rule of chairman Mao Zedong, including the The Origins of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s Last Revolution.
MacFarquhar, who started writing on Communist China as early as the 1960s, finished the first of his three-volume The Origins of the Cultural Revolution in 1974, two years before the end of the decade of turmoil, which is still a taboo topic in China.
He later co-edited the latest two volumes of The Cambridge History of China, an ongoing series published by Cambridge University Press.