The China syndrome

That, again, is "the Needham question," and the great irony is that despite the 24 volumes, 15,000 pages and 3 million words written by Needham and his collaborators and successors, we still don't have a satisfactory answer to that question. It could be that very indeterminacy that explains why Winchester devotes far more time to telling us about Needham's rambunctious, irrepressible love life and his freewheeling socialist politics than he does to teasing out the implications of this central conundrum. If Needham was baffled, what hope for a mere biographer? But that's a shame, because the Needham question is a challenge that forces all students of China, or, for that matter, students of the history of science, or of history in general, to wrinkle their brow. A truly satisfactory appraisal of Needham's life would make "the Needham question" a central theme, rather than sequester it off in a few paragraphs in an epilogue.

But Winchester appears more comfortable immersing himself in the particularities of a peculiarly British way of academic life than he is in tackling such hard questions. When Winchester writes, of Needham's life in Cambridge, "He could come whenever he wished to the fellows' oak-paneled combination rooms to take a usually indifferent sherry or rather better claret beneath paintings of forgotten divines of noble antiquity," it's not so hard to see Winchester himself wrinkling his nose at the indifferent sherry. He's a little less sure-footed when discussing the evolution of, for example, China's meritocratic Confucian bureaucracy.

In the epilogue, Winchester asserts that the consensus opinion of current Sinologists is that "China, basically, stopped trying." That's too facile a summation when one is writing a biography of a man who devoted his entire life to understanding why China failed to capitalize on thousands of years of scientific and technological innovation. Winchester then skips through the main contending theories that attempt to explain China's failure: China's bureaucracy siphoned talent away from a potentially entrepreneurial merchant class, China did not have the spur to competition that Europe's many warring states inflicted on each other, China's totalitarian government quashed initiative.

But Needham himself, writes Winchester, "never fully worked out the answers." (Although he did propose, halfheartedly, a variation on the bureacracy thesis in his essay "General Conclusions and Reflections," a portion of which is online.)

Perhaps it was because he was too close to the topic, seeing many trees but not enough forest. And though he makes an attempt at offering up some answers in his final volume, he never seems fully convinced of his own arguments, and never fully explains his reasons. It has been left to others to take up the challenge in his place.

There is a poignancy to Needham's unfulfilled quest that evokes a classical drunken Chinese poet lamenting the transience of spring or the unknowability of the Dao. Joseph Needham dedicated so much prodigious brainpower to answering one transcendent question, and created a work of immense, lasting genius, but he never arrived at an answer! One can almost hear the original Daoist master, Zhuangzi, chuckling. Foolish indeed are they with the hubris to believe they can understand how history unfolds.

Needham's futility makes a mockery of Winchester's subtitle: Needham did not "unlock" the mystery of the Middle Kingdom -- if anything, he boosted the intensity of the paradox by establishing just how incredible and vast China's technological achievements were, before "progress," to all intents and purposes, halted.

It could well be, as Winchester proposes, that in another century the "Needham question" will be moot. Fewer and fewer people regard China today as intrinsically backward, or incapable of innovation. On the contrary -- by all available indications China is gearing up for a big stretch run that will make the fumbling of the Qing Dynasty seem like just a bad early morning daydream. Measured against the great scale of Chinese history, the last few centuries may just be a bump in the road.

So what does that mean for Needham's legacy?

Nothing to worry about. The glory of "Science and Civilisation in China" is that the big unanswered questions are ultimately irrelevant in the sheer, astonishing face of the glories of China's past so painstakingly documented. Those books, lined up together by my bedroom window, don't need to explain China; they are China. I find them immensely reassuring -- even if China is thousands of miles away from me and my own Chinese has rusted away to the point of uselessness, all I need to do is pluck out a volume at random, and I am there.

From Vol. IV, Part 3: "Civil Engineering and Nautics," Chapter 29: "Nautical Technology," Section (e): "The Chinese ship in philology and archaeology," Sub-section (4): "The seas they sailed," Sub-sub-section (vi): "Motives, medicines and masteries," Page 530:

Before long, of course, the humanistic Renaissance curiosity about all exotic things asserted itself strongly in the West, but this was an old Chinese tradition too which had been very powerful, for example, during the Tang period. Said Huang Sheng-Tseng:

Amid the thundering billows and surges rearing mountain-high, helped by their flying masts and labouring oars, now with their cordage tightly strained and now under loosened sails, the envoys journeyed many myriads of li, and in their voyaging to and fro spent well-nigh thirty years ...

Then, their vessels filled with pearls and precious stones, with eagle-wood and ambergris, with marvellous beasts and birds -- unicorns and lions, halcyons and peacocks -- with rarities like camphor and gums and essences distilled from roses, together with ornaments such as coral and divers kinds of gems, the envoys returned.

Needham went to China and came back with pearls and precious stones beyond measure, loaded down with more eagle-wood and ambergris than most mortals could hope to contemplate. And then he shared it all with the rest of us.