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Roderick MacFarquhar | |
|---|---|
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| Member of Parliament forBelper | |
| In office 28 February 1974 – 7 April 1979 | |
| Preceded by | Geoffrey Stewart-Smith |
| Succeeded by | Sheila Faith |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar (1930-12-02)2 December 1930 |
| Died | 10 February 2019(2019-02-10) (aged 88) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Party | Labour (before 1981) |
| Other political affiliations | SDP (1980s) |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2, includingLarissa |
| Alma mater | |
| Philosophical work | |
| Institutions | |
| Main interests | Modern Chinese history |
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar (2 December 1930 – 10 February 2019) was a Britishsinologist, politician, and journalist.
MacFarquhar was founding editor ofChina Quarterly in 1959. He served as aMember of Parliament in the 1970s, then joined theBBC. In the 1980s, he became a professor atHarvard University, where he served several terms as director of theFairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He was best known for his studies of Maoist China, the three-volumeThe Origins of the Cultural Revolution andMao's Last Revolution.[1]
MacFarquhar was born inLahore,British India (nowPakistan). His father was Sir Alexander MacFarquhar, a member of the Indian Civil Service and later a senior diplomat at theUnited Nations. His mother was Berenice (née Whitburn). He was educated at theAitchison College in Lahore andFettes College, an independent school inEdinburgh.[2]
After spending part of hisnational service from 1949 to 1950 inEgypt andJordan as a second lieutenant in theRoyal Tank Regiment, he went up toKeble College,Oxford to readPhilosophy, Politics and Economics, obtaining a BA in 1953. He then went on to obtain a master's degree fromHarvard University in Far Eastern Regional Studies in 1955, studying withJohn King Fairbank, who supported his career as a China scholar.[citation needed]
He worked as a journalist on the staff of theDaily Telegraph andSunday Telegraph from 1955 to 1961 specialising in China, and also reported forBBC televisionPanorama from 1963 to 1965. He was the founding editor ofThe China Quarterly from 1959 to 1968, and a non-resident fellow ofSt Antony's College, Oxford, from 1965 to 1968. In 1969 he was a senior research fellow atColumbia University inNew York City, and in 1971 he returned to England to hold a similar fellowship at theRoyal Institute of International Affairs. MacFarquhar completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics in 1981.[3]
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In the1966 general election, MacFarquhar fought theEaling South constituency for theLabour Party but failed to dislodge the sittingConservative MP. Two years later, he was Labour candidate who attempted to retain theMeriden seat in aby-election; he was on the wrong end of an 18.4%swing at the height of theWilson government's unpopularity.[citation needed]
Following the defeat ofGeorge Brown in 1970 and favourable boundary changes, MacFarquhar was selected to fight theBelper constituency, and at theFebruary 1974 general election succeeded in winning the seat from its sitting Conservative MPGeoffrey Stewart-Smith. Although he won, there was an estimated swing of 4% to the Conservatives had the same boundaries applied in the previous election.[citation needed]
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 inClay Cross who had broken council housing laws enacted by the previous Conservative government. However, there were exceptions: he also abstained on a vote to increase theCivil list payments on 26 February 1975. He acted asParliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) toDavid Ennals, a minister of the state at theForeign and Commonwealth Office, and retained the job when Ennals was promoted to beSecretary of State for Social Services. He was a member of the Select Committee on Science and Technology.
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In 1978 MacFarquhar resigned his office as PPS after voting against the Government. In that year, he became a Governor of theSchool of Oriental and African Studies, aUniversity of London constituent body. The post gave him a job which he could do if he lost his seat. In the1979 general election, MacFarquhar did indeed lose by 800 votes, and returned to academia and broadcasting (returning to "24 Hours" for a year).
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 theSocial Democratic Party. He fought theSouth Derbyshire seat, which contained most of then-abolished Belper, for the SDP in the1983 general election, and nearly succeeded in beating the Labour candidate, although the seat was easily won by the Conservatives.
He was a fellow of theWoodrow 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 theFairbank Center for Chinese Studies atHarvard 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 thePeople's Republic through to theCultural Revolution. Volume three of his studyThe Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961-1966 (1997) won theJoseph Levenson Book Prize for 1999.
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]
MacFarquhar married Emily Cohen, a journalist and East Asian studies scholar, in 1964. They had two children, the writerLarissa MacFarquhar and economistRory 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 fromheart failure at a hospital inCambridge, Massachusetts on 10 February 2019, at age 88.[8][9]
 |
| 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. |
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forBelper February 1974–1979 | Succeeded by |
