The China syndrome

Eccentric scholar Joseph Needham devoted his life to documenting the brilliant innovations of Chinese civilization -- and the mystery of why the West eclipsed it.

By Andrew Leonard

Read more: Books, Andrew Leonard, China, Asia, History, Reviews, Book reviews

May 19, 2008 | For reasons lost to history, my late uncle decided at some point in the early 1970s to purchase, one by one, volume after volume of Joseph Needham's magisterial work, "Science and Civilisation in China." My uncle was no China scholar, never visited Asia, and rarely discussed what he had learned from perusing Needham. I don't even know for sure that he did read the books, though perhaps, like me, the eventual inheritor of the volumes, he dipped in from time to time to dabble in the industrial uses of bamboo during the Tang Dynasty, or to freshen up on the techniques of porcelain manufacture in the kilns of Jingdezhen, or to marvel that the Chinese invented the wheelbarrow a full thousand years before the Europeans got around to the job.

Or perhaps, also like me, my uncle hoped that if one day he did manage to read Needham's epic from start to finish, he would learn the answer to the famous "Needham question": How did it come to pass that a civilization with such an astounding history of inventiveness and scholarship and intellectual curiosity failed to make the leap into the modern world of science? Where did China go wrong? Why did the industrial revolution take off in Europe, and not China?

Or maybe all that was required was a casual glance at one of the many fulsome blurbs on the back cover of Vol. I, "Introductions and Orientations" -- "Perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man" -- and my uncle decided that no home library could be complete without such a masterpiece. In any event, a failure to read every word of the 15 volumes that my uncle ultimately assembled is understandable: "Science and Civilisation in China" is a work so massive and so detailed it is almost impossible to imagine reading all of it, much less writing it, even if it does rank, as Needham biographer Simon Winchester writes in "The Man Who Loved China," "among the great intellectual accomplishments of all time."

Those 15 volumes, plus another that I purchased myself (918 pages on ceramic technology!), now sit in my bedroom occupying pride of place on their own dedicated bookcase. Because while my uncle never displayed much in the way of overt sino-philia, my own story is different. I began studying Chinese in college and headed to Asia a few months after graduation. I have spent countless hours tracking down the elusive secrets of the Chinese written language through scores of dictionaries, and fallen into equally deep infatuations with Ming Dynasty Neo-Confucian poet-sages and the spiciness of Sichuan pork slivers stir-fried in "the style of fish."

I feel a kinship across the decades with Dr. Needham. I believe I can imagine exactly what it was like for the esteemed biochemist to disembark from "a battered old Douglas C-47 Skytrain" in Chongqing in March 1943, and feel instantly, passionately overwhelmed by a culture equal parts alien and entrancing. I believe all the outsiders who have become fascinated with China can relate. There's a brilliance to the first part of the title of Winchester's biography -- "The Man Who Loved China" (let's ignore for now the ungainly subtitle, "The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom") -- because even as it implies that this one man may have loved the civilization to an extent greater than the vast majority of the rest of us, the words still strike a chord with anyone who has been bitten by the Asia bug. We all savor that taste -- Needham just took it to the next level. I've been known to haunt used bookstores looking for obscure out-of-print China-related gems. Chinese acquaintances of Needham's sent him, unsolicited, priceless encyclopedias of Chinese history and culture totaling thousands of volumes. I taught myself how to cook Sichuan food. Needham taught himself the entire history and philosophy of Chinese science.

In Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary ("The Professor and the Madman," 1998) he demonstrated a facility for profiling odd scholars. In "The Man Who Loved China," Winchester hits the eccentricity jackpot. This came as a surprise to me. Call me prejudiced, but I presumed that a Cambridge don who devoted half a century to compiling a history of Chinese science might have been a bit fusty. I did not expect to learn that he was an avid nudist, a wild Morris dancer, "an accordion player, and a chain-smoking churchgoer" and a supporter of gay rights who was a participant in an "open" marriage that allowed him to carry on a wife-approved decades-long affair with the love of his life, a Chinese woman named Lu Gwei-djen. I also had no idea of the extent of his radical left-wing politics or of his embarrassing role in a McCarthy-era contretemps over whether the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War. His efforts as a diplomat on behalf of the British in World War II to ensure that Chinese scientists received the necessary resources to keep the fires of intellectual inquiry alive even as Japanese bombers flew overhead were a complete revelation.

So there is much to learn from "The Man Who Loved China," an enjoyable, breezy read, well suited for reading on the chaise longue, gin-and-tonic in hand. But there is also a telling, unresolved paradox running through Winchester's tale. After an early and hugely successful career as a biochemist, capped off by being named a member of the ultra-prestigious Royal Society at the tender age of 41, Needham devoted the remainder of his life to, on the one hand, documenting how technologically far ahead China had been for millennia when compared to the West, and on the other hand, striving to understand why Europe suddenly jumped in front -- a monumental tectonic shift that dominates the reality of globalization to this day.

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