The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist

by Simon Winchester

  But he did find his way. He typed out the pages for the Nautics chapters, all of them with two fingers, all of them at a furious rate, day after day through the late 1950s while at the same time he was working on other volumes and parts that dealt with wholly unrelated topics such as gold, tilt hammers, parachutes, segmental arch bridges, and reservoirs.

  He finished the pages and sent them off to specialists—among the forty-odd who dealt with the Nautics volumes, all giants in the field, were James Fitch of New York, Klaus Fessel of Tübingen, Alfred Lieber of Jerusalem, Clough Williams-Ellis of Penrhyndeudraeth,41 and G. R. G. Worcester (then the greatest living expert on Chinese junks) of Windle-sham. He then recast his chapters on the basis of their advice; sent completed texts to his long-suffering collaborator at Cambridge University Press, an apparently saintly editor named Peter Burbidge; and awaited publication.

  This one volume eventually emerged in 1971. Needham dedicated it to the memory of the following:

  CHI CHHOA-TING

  Historian of China’s water ways and works

  a friend beside the Chialing River

  Economic and financial leader in a resurgent land

  and of

  HERBERT CHATLEY

  Once Professor of Engineering at Thang-shan College

  and

  Chief Engineer of the Huang-po Conservancy

  an “Old China Hand” who loved the Chinese people

  Historian of the engineers of Cathay and Manzi

  It had taken fifteen years to make. No doubt someone will one day measure the tonnage of supporting paperwork or the footage of shelf space that the paperwork occupies, and come up with a statistical analysis that will rank this book alongside the compilation of enormous dictionaries or encyclopedias elsewhere. And this was just one volume—just one of many volumes that were compiled for Science and Civilisation in China as a whole. And all made, in essence, by this one fascinating man.

  As word of the project spread, the honors began to trickle in. One that caused a peculiarly British kerfuffle came from the Republic of China, and was called with appropriate grandiloquence the Order of the Brilliant Star with Cravat. Needham was told about it by the Chinese embassy in October 1947, was naturally thrilled, and casually asked his former bosses at the Foreign Office if accepting the honor would cause any diplomatic problems or offense. To his considerable astonishment he was told that yes, it would, and under no circumstances was he going to be allowed to wear a foreign honor unless given personal permission by His Majesty the King.

  It took nearly two years for this permission to be secured. Letters from lofty figures in the various dusty British government departments that dealt either with protocol or treaties or had access to the corridors of Buckingham Palace tut-tutted their way around Whitehall. Eyebrows were raised at the notion that any foreigner could legitimately honor a man so exalted as a British diplomat (which is what Needham had been during the period for which the Chinese wanted to honor him). Discreet working lunches were held in offices at Westminster, and even more hushed dinners were held in clubs on Pall Mall, all to discuss this unprecedented (and to some, rather impertinently sycophantic) gesture.

  Finally, in June 1949, Sir Alan Lascelles, a courtier of huge distinction at the monarch’s side, agreed that Joseph Needham’s work had done much to better relations between London and the Nationalist government, now back in Nanjing. He thus wrote to Needham at Caius College saying formally, “His Majesty King George VI has been Pleased to Give Restricted Permission for N. J. T. M. Needham, Esq. To Wear the Order of the Brilliant Star with Cravat Essentially while in China and in the Presence of High Officials in China.”

  The irony of fate intervened. It all turned out to be much too late. In China the Communists were fast assuming power; the People’s Republic was declared the following October; and four months after the king had given his permission, Chiang Kai-shek, who had signed the warrant for Needham’s award, fled for Taipei. Joseph Needham’s much-vaunted honor, the source of so much fuss in London, had become overnight no more than a bauble, recognized only in Taiwan, and except as a collector’s curio, barely worth the paper it was written on.

  Moreover, at about the same time, suddenly, and without any warning, Joseph Needham made the most terrible blunder.

  He made a decision, based on his lifelong romantic flirtation with international communism, that very nearly killed the entire project, almost before the first volume ever appeared. It was a fall from grace, and one for which Joseph Needham had no one to blame but himself, and it haunts the project even to this day.

  It all came about by way of a mysterious telephoned invitation from a conference room in the capital of Norway. The caller was Chinese, and once the static on the line had cleared, he turned out to be one of Needham’s oldest wartime friends. Would Joseph care to leave Cambridge for a while, the caller asked, and come back for a spell to China?

  SIX

  Persona Non Grata: The Certain Fall from Grace

  On the Early Chinese Use of Biological Agents in Bombs

  For this bomb you take tung oil, urine, sal ammoniac, faeces and scallion juice, and heat them so as to coat a lot of iron pellets and bits of broken porcelain. Then fill in (with a gunpowder core) to a casing of cast iron, making a fragmentation bomb. When it bursts it breaks into pieces which wound the skin and break the bones (of enemy soldiers) and blind their eyes. Even birds flying in the air cannot escape the effects of the explosion.

  —DESCRIPTION OF THE “BONE-BURNING AND BRUISING FIRE-OIL MAGIC BOMB” FROM THE FIRE-DRAKE MANUAL BY JIAO YU, MID-FOURTEENTH CENTURY

  From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume V, Part 7

  Did the American armed forces use biological weapons during the Korean War? That question—which more than half a century later has still not been satisfactorily answered—very nearly proved the undoing of Joseph Needham, and his reputation remains haunted by the furor it provoked.

  This allegation against the American military first arose in 1951, just a year after tanks of the North Korean army had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and the communist leadership in Pyongyang declared war on the Republic of South Korea, which was backed by the United States. By the summer of that year—when the Chinese army had become fully involved on the side of the North—the war had become utterly bogged down in the stalemate which was its principal, bleak characteristic. Enormous numbers of troops—1 million on the communist side and very nearly as many among the twelve armies fighting under the flag of the United Nations—were sweeping back and forth along the mountainous, often bitterly cold, pitiless terrain, gaining territory, losing territory, demolishing cities to deny their use by an onrushing enemy, blowing up bridges, bombing railways, and in all manner of cruel ways wrecking the lives of millions, and for decades to come.

  While the two sides were locked in this desperate and unwinnable struggle, reports began to surface suggesting that something sinister might be afoot. Newspapers in Moscow reported that American agents had poisoned North Korean water wells with cholera bacteria; that anthrax had been used to infect cattle on farms in the far north of the country; and, most bizarre of all, that lepers had been parachuted or otherwise infiltrated into areas held by the communists, where they were left to infect as best they could the enemy around them. The reports caused anxiety and commentary in left-wing newspapers around the world, but otherwise, because of their suspect provenance, they were roundly ignored. For a while things calmed down.

  But early in 1952 fresh reports—similar but rather more dramatic—surfaced again, this time in the Chinese press. It was said that mysterious diseases were breaking out in Korea and Manchuria, and that they were inconsistent with either the region or the season. Cholera, a hot-weather ailment, was found in a Korean village in January, and doctors were baffled. Infected insects were found lying on top of patches of snow—and they were always found, it seemed, just after the United States made nighttime air raids.

  One instance r
emains a contemporary Chinese legend. In the early spring of 1952, villagers in a Chinese county close to the North Korean frontier reported that during the night hundreds of small vole-like rodents fell from the skies, landing on their roofs, scattered into their haystacks, and even wriggling onto the kangs, the platforms on which women and children were still sleeping.

  By the time the day had fully broken, the men of this village’s local communist leadership knew exactly how to react. They acted quickly—skeptics would later say too quickly. They assumed these were alien and probably disease-ridden animals that had been dropped by American planes coming across the Yalu River from their bases in Korea. They had been warned that this might happen, and so, as they had been fully trained to do, they organized a hurried collect-and-destroy campaign. According to North Korean accounts, by the end of the day every single vile American vole had been tossed onto a pyre, and all traces of possible infection that the dastardly American generals had tried to inflict on the villagers had been purged.

  By coincidence—or by supposed coincidence—China was at that moment in the middle of a state-directed public health offensive, the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign, run with all the manic energy for which the Chinese Communists were becoming known. It took just a single exhortation from the country’s Great Helmsman to get things started. “Let us get mobilized,” Mao Zedong wrote the week before in a memorial presented to the National Health Conference in Beijing. “Let us attend to hygiene, reduce the incidence of disease, raise the standards of health, and crush the enemy’s germ warfare.”

  His words were immediately echoed by Zhou Enlai, China’s premier and foreign minister—who by now was a good friend of Needham’s from their sojourns in Chongqing nine years before.42 That Zhou agreed wholly convinced Needham of Mao’s plan: China’s hygiene campaign, he said later, was just the kind of first-rate national effort of will that was so hugely impressive in the early idealistic days of the Chinese Communists. Needham truly believed—though many said he was naive to do so—that a properly compassionate nation could and should marshall its efforts just like this, selflessly and for the common good. A capitalist system, he thought, would simply never be up to the task, since the need for profit would always mask and distort the mission’s ultimate goal.

  So he was more than a little surprised to read that Zhou had taken his theme somewhat farther than the idealistic goals behind the plan. The premier told his audience that he supported an accusation just made by the North Korean foreign minister, saying that the Americans, in dropping sickly voles on Chinese villages, were clearly up to no good. He was quite specific: “I charge the United States government before the people of the whole world, with the heinous crime of employing bacteriological weapons.” He called on “the world’s peace-loving peoples” to “take steps to put an end to the frenzied, criminal acts of the American Government.”

  The world had to take notice. Zhou’s evidence was at best slender, and largely circumstantial. There were said to have been outbreaks of plague, respiratory anthrax, and encephalitis in northern Korea and southern Manchuria, and local people reported that germ-carrying insects and animals, such as rats, mice, and voles, had been found on the ground in the affected areas, scattered randomly as if dropped from on high. Teams of Chinese scientists concluded that America, desperate to tip the strategic balance on the Korean peninsula, had been waging a particularly cruel secret war that involved the dissemination of lethal bacteria and viral agents.

  Evidence or not, this was certainly within the bounds of credibility. It was known to a limited degree at the time to the intelligence agencies—and is known more widely today—that America had for some years after World War II been developing biological weapons. After the capture of the Japanese army’s notorious Unit 731 “Water Purification Camp” at Pingfan, near Harbin in Manchuria—where an elite Japanese team conducted unimaginably terrible biological experiments on living human prisoners (the same was done at a similar camp in the center of Nanjing)—a deal was struck, whereby American military researchers gained access to all the Japanese data in exchange for freedom, or very light prison sentences, for many of the principal experimenters.

  Much of America’s subsequent research—using animals and a very small number of human volunteers—was then conducted by the U.S. Army at its chemical warfare research center at Fort Detrick in Maryland.43 The success of this work then led to an enthusiastic memorandum, approved by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in February 1952, declaring that henceforth the United States should be ready to deploy biological weapons “whenever it is militarily advantageous.”

  While these developments were taking place in America, Mao’s government announced a number of sweeping public policy campaigns—such as those involving public health, with the people being regularly mobilized by party cadres to find and destroy outbreaks of disease (and to catch houseflies). That the efforts of this campaign turned up so much illness in 1952 may be regarded as a testament to its success—or its results may simply have been engineered to provide the government with some very useful propaganda. Whatever the motives or the effects, the coincidence was stark: the American military now had an admitted ability to wage germ warfare, and the Chinese hygiene campaign was turning up inexplicable outbreaks of illness caused by germs. Two and two could easily be added together to produce—at least from the propagandists’ point of view—a highly desirable result.

  Two months after Zhou Enlai’s intelligence staff told him of America’s memorandum about biological warfare, he made the connection, and then gave his hostile and highly tendentious speech. And following that, Communist China’s new spin machine was cranked up and presented to the world at large the full extent of the atrocities the Americans were now charged with committing.

  This was the point at which Joseph Needham became involved. About six weeks after Zhou made his charges, he sent Guo Moruo, who was the head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an old colleague of Needham’s, to Oslo for a meeting of the World Peace Council, a body set up three years before, and largely funded by the Soviet Union, to promote nuclear disarmament and, as its name suggested, world peace. At this meeting Guo swiftly turned up the temperature by issuing a formal request for an International Science Commission to investigate the charges. The International Red Cross had first been suggested, but the Chinese and North Koreans said that a report issued by this body, which was based in Geneva, would probably be biased in favor of the West, and dismissed the idea out of hand.

  Guo told the conference that what China and North Korea wanted was a group of six or seven “impartial and independent scientists…known for their devotion to humanitarian causes.” This last phrase was unfortunate, since it was a code that in those years of the cold war suggested to critics an ominous hint of fellow travelers, and automatically placed the validity of any work they might do under suspicion in the West. Guo was a Chinese Communist; the Peace Council was “left-leaning”; “humanitarian causes” meant, in apparatchik-speak, “our cause.” From its inception, then, the International Commission had problems with credibility.

  Nonetheless, seven scientists were quickly found, and only one of them, a professor of biology named Zhukov from the Soviet Academy of Medicine, was from an overtly communist background. Others were more obviously neutral. There were reasonably well-respected biologists from the universities in Rome, Bologna, and São Paulo. There was the director of the main clinical laboratory of the hospitals in Stockholm, and also the head of a well-known French animal physiology department.

  But then came a coup de théâtre, which startled the academic world. Guo still remembered Needham from their wartime meetings in China, and he was able to telephone from Norway to Cambridge to ask if, for old times’ sake, Needham might consider joining the group. Guo piled on the flattery, as he had been instructed. All Needham’s friends in China were longing to see him, Guo said. The newly liberated China was a sight well worth seeing. It was the socialist dream made real—and all of
Needham’s travel expenses would be paid, all his quarters would be comfortable, all his companions agreeable. Needham withered under the pitch. He apparently needed little persuasion, and that same evening agreed readily to go and see for himself if the charges against the American forces were true or false.

  And so on the following morning the news was formally announced: the International Commission would be led by Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist of towering reputation, a man who had spent four years in China during the Japanese war and who was—of crucial importance for the commission’s study of documents and interviews with witnesses—fluent both in written and spoken Chinese. There should be no doubt, said Guo, that the commission and its work would eventually be taken seriously, since its conclusions would be underwritten by men of the greatest integrity and a commitment to unbiased scientific inquiry.

  It was to turn out very differently.

  The team arrived in China in June, on a mission designed to last two months. Needham, a man given to moments of intellectual vanity, promptly decided that the colleagues with whom he had been saddled were of rather lower caliber than he had hoped. In letters home he fretted that the participation of such “undistinguished” scientists might well tarnish the legitimacy of the commission’s work.44 So to compensate for this, he threw himself into his allotted tasks with typical vigor, traveling to the sites of the alleged vole attacks, interviewing villagers, translating and writing reports, and compiling vast quantities of notes.

  The others in his team may have slipped on their white coats and gone to laboratories to conduct experiments on the material that had been collected as evidence. But Needham, delighted to be back in China for the first time since 1946, eager to see his old friends, and thrilled beyond words to be able to offer some support to the party that now held power in the People’s Republic, stayed either in Beijing or the south Manchurian city of Shenyang, or went to the various sites where bombs and canisters of animals had allegedly been dropped. He pointedly did no scientific investigations. His only regret was that neither he nor anyone on the team had the “good fortune” to see anything being dropped from the air—though they met a great many Chinese people whom they named in the eventual report, and who had said, apparently credibly, that they had seen such things.