Established by a gift to the Association from the friends of the prominent historian of China and East Asia at Harvard and President of the Association in 1968, the John K. Fairbank Prize is awarded for the best work on the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan since the year 1800.

2023
H. Yumi Kim, Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford Univ. Press)

2022
Hwasook B. Nam, Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea (Cornell Univ. Press)

2021
Eric Schluessel, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia Univ. Press)

2020
Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (Univ. of California Press)

2019
Chris Courtney, The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2018
Thomas Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press)

2017
Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books)

2016
Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Harvard Univ. Press)

2015
Rian Thum, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard Univ. Press)

2013
Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Harvard Univ. Asia Center of Harvard Univ. Press)

2012
Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

2011
Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (Univ. of California Press)

2010
James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Univ. Press)

2009
Klaus Muehlhahn, Criminal Justice in China: A History (Harvard Univ. Press)

2008
Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Univ. of California Press)

2007
Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Univ. of California Press)

2006
Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia Univ. Press)

2005
Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Univ. of California Press)

2004
Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (Harvard Univ. Asia Center)

2003
Norman Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage (Univ. of California Press)

2002
Julia Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Univ. of California Press)

2001
Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Univ. of California Press)

2000
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton Univ. Press)

1999
John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New Press)

1998
Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Univ. of California Press)

1997
Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth (Columbia Univ. Press)

1996
David Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Univ. of California Press)

1995
Karen Wigen, The Making of Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (Univ. of California Press)

1994
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937

1993
Elisabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike (Stanford Univ. Press)
Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Univ. of California Press)

1992
Carter Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Ko-ch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945 (Univ. of Washington Press)

1992
Kathryn Bernhardt, Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950 (Stanford Univ. Press)

1991
Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Univ. of California Press)

1990
Miriam Silverberg, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton Univ. Press)

1989
Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-42 (Stanford Univ. Press)

1988
Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Univ. of California Press)

1987
Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Univ. of California Press)

1986
Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton Univ. Press)

1985
Philip Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford Univ. Press)

1983
Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-47 (Princeton Univ. Press)

1981
Conrad Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862-68 (Univ. of Hawaii Press)

1979
Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Univ. of California Press)

1977
Gail Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879-1946 (Harvard Univ. Press)

1975
Yu-wen Jen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (Yale Univ. Press)

1973
William Beasley, The Meiji Restoration (Stanford Univ. Press)

1971
Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-37 (Harvard Univ. Press)

1969
Harold Schiffrin, Sun Yat-Sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Univ. of California Press)
Tetsuo Najita, Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, 1905-15 (Harvard Univ. Press)