[Marxism] Chinese science

[Louis Proyect]

The Times Literary Supplement, October 1, 2008
What the West makes of Chinese science
Early China's scientific achievements and Joseph Needham, their 
controversial advocate
John Keay

Simon Winchester
BOMB, BOOK AND COMPASS
Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China
336pp. Viking. £20.
978 0 670 91378 7

Donald B. Wagner
SCIENCE AND CIVILISATION IN CHINA
Volume Five: Chemistry and Chemical Technology Part Eleven: Ferrous 
Metallurgy
478pp. Cambridge University Press. £120 (US $220).
978 0 521 87566 0

Until fifty years ago, it was widely assumed that China had no tradition 
of scientific thought and innovation. Meticulous observation and 
reasoned deduction were taken to be European traits, as was the 
application of scientific principles to industrial production. The 
Chinese were supposed to be good at imitating, not originating; and the 
notion that the West’s scientific and industrial revolutions owed 
anything to the East’s inventiveness seemed laughable. We now know 
better. Ancient China’s precocity in almost every field of scientific 
achievement has since been acknowledged – in medicine, metallurgy, 
ceramics, mechanics, chemistry, physics, mathematics. Ridicule has 
turned to awe, tinged with trepidation.

This dramatic reversal is credited to one man, the redoubtable Dr Joseph 
Needham, plus a small team of devoted disciples and a monumental work of 
scholarship. All three provide rich matter for Simon Winchester’s Bomb, 
Book and Compass, while the stature of Needham’s great work may be 
judged by the appearance of a new volume on ferrous metallurgy, the 
twenty-fourth in his Science and Civilisation in China series. Fifty 
years since the first volume appeared, and thirteen since Needham died, 
the work of assessing pre-Qing China’s scientific achievement goes on. 
“Sci[ence] in general in China – why [did it] not develop?”, wondered 
Needham in an aide-memoire jotted down in 1942. Later touted as “the 
Needham question”, this conundrum about why so promising a tradition 
failed to generate its own industrial revolution has never been 
satisfactorily answered – by Needham or anyone else. But the idea behind 
it – that China did indeed once excel in science – has generated an 
industry of its own. Mining the world’s most richly documented culture 
for references to scientific and technological practice now provides 
employment for a host of scholars; many of them enjoy the resources on 
offer at Cambridge University’s specially built Needham Research 
Institute; and seldom has there not been a volume of Science and 
Civilisation in China making its stately progress across the print floor 
of the University Press.

For revealing how, in almost every conceivable field of scientific 
endeavour, the Chinese had preceded other nations, Needham was hailed as 
“the Erasmus of the twentieth century”, fawned on by the Left and feted 
by international academe. The Fellows of Caius College, Cambridge, made 
him their Master; Beijing, no less than Taipei, showered him with 
honours. Yet, boisterous and headstrong, Needham was not without his 
critics. Cambridge had cause to resent his long absences and reluctance 
to teach. Washington steadfastly refused him entry following his 
endorsement of Communist claims that US aircraft had dropped 
cholera-infected rats on North Korea. Forums designed to further the 
cause of international understanding were something of a deathtrap for 
Needham. He was hoodwinked by his Maoist friends – and by a Soviet-laid 
germ-trail in respect of the rats. It was not until the Cultural 
Revolution that his faith in Communist China began to waver. His flaws 
and foibles were legion, and it is these that seem to have recommended 
him to that connoisseur of bookish eccentricity, Simon Winchester.

Bomb, Book and Compass (these being some of the undisputed products of 
Chinese invention) is no more a standard biography than was The Surgeon 
of Crowthorne (Winchester’s book about William Minor and the OED). 
Instead, Winchester delivers a masterly narrative, rich in description 
and quirky asides, and as undemanding as it is compelling. Needham, we 
learn, though a distinguished embryologist, self-taught sinologist and 
general polymath, was susceptible to distractions. He was keen on steam 
engines, morris dancing, singing and swimming in the nude. A Communist 
in all but party membership, he yet remained a devout Anglo-Catholic; 
and a dedicated husband in so far as his compulsive womanizing permitted.

Nearly half of Winchester’s book is devoted to the years (1943–6) that 
Needham spent in China as the head of a wartime agency called the 
Sino-British Scientific Co-operation Office. Winchester insists it had 
nothing to do with intelligence gathering and was solely concerned with 
offering encouragement and materials to scientific institutions uprooted 
by the Japanese invasion. But it does seem to have involved more 
adventurous travel than the distribution of books and laboratory 
equipment strictly required. Though based in Chongqing, the capital of 
unoccupied China, Needham was seldom there. It was his first visit to 
China and would be his only extended residence in the country; he was 
determined to make the most of it. His three major journeys, one by 
truck to Gansu in the north-western desert, another by road to Yunnan in 
the south-west, and a third mainly by rail to Fuzhou in the south-east, 
were as notable for what he learned about Chinese science as for what he 
imparted to it. Indeed, the immense collection of books and artefacts 
that he brought back probably outweighed the largesse he distributed. 
Shipped to Cambridge, they would provide the raw material for Science 
and Civilisation in China and the core of the Needham Research 
Institute’s extensive library.

Winchester has retraced these expeditions exhaustively. He makes good 
use of the reports submitted at the time, and writes of China with real 
affection. The Man Who Loved China, which is the title of his book in 
the US, could as well apply to the author as the subject. But all this 
leaves little room for the rest of Needham’s career, which is sketched 
in the broadest of strokes, and none at all for the ongoing debate over 
the methodology of Science and Civilisation in China.

Needham’s purpose was to demonstrate not just the scale of early China’s 
scientific achievement, but its importance in the development of world 
science. Even his disciples have had difficulty with this. In his 
handsome contribution on ferrous technology – Part Eleven of the fifth 
volume, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, in Science and Civilisation 
in China – Donald B. Wagner dissociates himself from Needham’s faith in 
both “the essential virtue of Progress” and “modern natural science as a 
measure of historical value”. Like others, he is also unhappy with 
Needham’s extraction of Chinese science from its geographical, cultural 
and social context and his categorization of it into essentially Western 
disciplines – chemistry, physics, biology, etc – that were unfamiliar to 
the Chinese. And finally, though he wrestles with the Needham dictum 
that the West owed its eventual technological superiority to the East, 
Wagner concludes that in respect of iron, “the results are not by any 
means conclusive”.

Unfazed by such apostasy, Needham stuck to his task well into his 
nineties (he died in 1995). He devoured every available text and 
interrogated every known authority for the earliest Chinese references 
to any relevant technology. Finding that these generally predated 
anything in other cultural traditions, he then awarded to China a 
precedence based on priority and offered conjectures as to how this 
technology might subsequently have spread to other receptive societies. 
He was, in short, a committed diffusionist; he made no allowance for the 
possibility of independent invention and parallel development elsewhere. 
He also made no allowance for the profusion and antiquity of Chinese 
textual sources compared with those of other cultures. The doubtful 
nature of references to ferrous technology in, for instance, India’s 
historiography does not prove that this material was unknown there; 
witness the famous iron pillar at the Qutb in Delhi. It merely affirms 
the comparative paucity of the textual resources available for 
pre-Islamic India.

Notching up these Chinese “inventions and discoveries” and awarding to 
each a date based on the earliest known reference became something of an 
obsession for Needham. Several such listings appear in his published 
works and have since been adapted by admirers; Winchester reproduces a 
representative example. But while one can hardly quarrel with “Blast 
furnace – 3rd century b.c.”, “Book, printed, first to be dated – a.d. 
868”, or “Crank handle – 1st century b.c.”, the whole exercise invites 
ridicule with the inclusion of items such as “Wheelbarrow, sail-assisted 
– 6th century a.d.”, “Great Wall of China – 3rd century b.c.”, or 
“Bookworm repellent – no date”. For reducing the painstakingly 
researched and elegantly written tomes of Science and Civilisation in 
China to the level of general knowledge trivia, Needham himself must 
bear much blame. But what Donald Wagner’s new volume well demonstrates 
is the extent to which recent archaeology, while modifying some of 
Needham’s conclusions, generally supports the veracity of the textual 
testimony and so the value of his life’s great work.


John Keay’s China: A history was published earlier this year. He is 
co-editor of The London Encyclopaedia, third edition, 2008.