"Eighty-two was an attempt by me to decide whether--if I had to choose a career other than politics, as the broad masses decided--teaching was something I wanted to do," he says.

His answer was apparently yes. Meanwhile, Harvard's Government Department started considering' MacFarquhar for tenure, hoping to replace Harvard's aging giants in the field.

At least four of Harvard's prominent East Asian specialists have recently reached or are nearing retirement age.

"He's done some remarkable work academically," says Fairbank. "He's not just a politician."

In fact, Fairbank adds, his starting the China Quarterly, "the leading worldwide academic journal on Communist China," and his editing of two volumes of the Cambridge History of Communist China "indicate his leadership" in the field.

As MacFarquhar ran for Parliament on the Social Democrat slate in 1983 from the Derbyshire South district, the Harvard Government Department was in the unusual position of rooting against him. "I told him I hoped he would lose, but it was just a joke," says Fairbank.

The Derbyshire voters didn't think so, and placed him third in a three-way race. 16.8 percent behind the leader, one Edwina Currie, a schoolteacher and Birmingham city councilor.

In the academic job market, "he could have gone almost anywhere," Fairbank surmises, but Harvard managed to snag him.

The Brit is now working on the "Cambridge History"; a book called "The History of Chinese Revolution"; and a third and final volume to his series, "Origins of the Cultural Revolution."

This past summer, MacFarquhar visited China to research, pouring over library books and interviewing the principals--something he couldn't do for 17 years preceding 1972.

"They wouldn't give me a visa," he says. "Someone [in China] felt they didn't like what I said about China. Today, of course, they have re-evaluated their history and now agree with what I've been saving all along."