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

by Simon Winchester

  This small and unnoticed bloodbath was one of many in Moscow during these frightening times. Beria was to be executed soon afterward, once Nikita Khrushchev had won power and had started to reverse many of Stalin’s policies and to purge their architects. But however mundane or bizarre, the episode had a certain sweet relevance to Needham’s later reputation.

  The revealed telegrams showed that he had operated in China and Korea in perfectly good faith, and had been a victim of a very clever and adroitly organized campaign of disinformation. He was, in other words, much more of a fool than a knave—and in truth not too much of a fool, even then.

  His worst crime was to have taken at face value the word of a great number of Chinese bacteriologists, men and women whom he trusted and in whom he firmly believed. In professional terms Needham was after all an exceptionally honorable man, a scientist given to following the scientists’ code—hypothesis, theory, experimentation, observation, discovery, and proof—which at every step demands a commitment to honesty and integrity, and which holds as a moral certainty the idea that results can never, ever be fudged, manipulated, or falsified.

  Given his absolute adherence to this guiding principle Needham simply could not imagine that, even with so profound a change in the regime in Beijing, the minds of so many scientists, hitherto as honorable as he, could possibly become so perverted merely in support of a new political dogma. Today we would regard that as naiveté; in 1953 cynics could only really say that by agreeing to join the commission he had set out on what was no more than a fool’s errand. Those who were his fans would remark, wearily: even Homer nods.

  There was to be a sad sequel to the story. In 1956 three American radicals then living in Shanghai—John and Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman—were charged in a federal court with the grave crimes of treason and sedition. Their offense was that they had published, in their magazine China Monthly Review, two treacherous articles. The first exposed the secret details of the deal allegedly struck between the United States government and the Japanese commanders of the Unit 731 terror camp—data about human experimentation in exchange for amnesty. The second article offered generally sympathetic coverage of the findings of Needham’s commission. The Powells’ readers would expect no less: they all knew that germ warfare had been conducted in Korea, and the commission’s report simply confirmed it.

  The defendants’ lawyer asked Needham to fly to America and testify on their behalf—his expenses would be paid, and the court would order a temporary American visa to be issued. But Needham refused. It was now four years after the commission had reported. By now, he said, his life was beginning to return to normal. The fellows of Caius had forgiven him, and he had been appointed to the college consilium. His work on Science and Civilisation in China was now occupying all of his life, and he did not wish to be subjected yet again to abuse and ostracism. So far as he was concerned, and sorry though he might have been for the “dreadful plight” of the three accused, the matter was now closed.

  As it happened, the passage of time eventually closed the case for the accused as well. As the 1950s ended and the 1960s began, a mood of tolerance began to find its way back into the American body politic. Public opinion turned against the witch hunters, and in consequence, in 1959, toward the close of the Eisenhower administration, the charges of treason were abandoned after a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. Two years later the U.S. attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, dropped the sedition charges also, and the Powells returned to their native San Francisco to run an antiques business. At the time of this writing John Powell, who was born in 1919 in Shanghai, remains in California, a survivor of a curious period in American history.

  As to whether the Americans ever did use bacteriological weapons in Korea or China, one has now to suppose they did not, but at the same time one suspects that the story has still not been fully told. It was the investigation itself that in the end, at least in academic circles, became the event most remembered from that time—and it was an event that took an inevitable toll on the stature and standing of the man who led it.

  But then came the publication of the first volumes of his book, and his precipitous fall from grace was suddenly, and impressively, arrested. And as the long line of massive volumes began to thunder from the presses, Joseph Needham’s once formidable reputation, so unexpectedly battered and bruised, began to recover.

  SEVEN

  The Passage to the Gate

  Two Last Recorded Wishes

  My concluding thought is that by an extraordinary series of events modern science was born, and swept across the world like a forest fire. All nations are now using it, and in some measure contributing to its development. We can only pray that those who control its use will develop it for the good not only of mankind but of the whole planet.

  —JOSEPH NEEDHAM, 1993—HIS FINAL WORDS IN THE ESSAY “GENERAL CONCLUSIONS AND REFLECTIONS”

  From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume VII, Part 2

  Joseph: I had at one time hoped to be with you when the last volume was published, but I promised that even if I was not on the bridge the ship would sail safely into port…. I am sure that day will come.

  —KENNETH ROBINSON: FROM AN IMAGINED CONVERSATION WITH THE LATE JOSEPH NEEDHAM, CAMBRIDGE REVIEW, 1995

  Reprinted in Science and Civilisation in China, Volume VII, Part 2

  Publication day of the first volume of what everyone was now referring to simply as the book was August 14, 1954, and Joseph and Dorothy Needham celebrated the event in a quietly deliberate style—and at a place he chose quite specifically, and for a raft of complicated reasons, some good, some less so.

  He had already been working hard on the proofs of the second volume when, late in July, he and Dorothy left Cambridge for Paris, taking the Dover packet. They were bound for Budapest, where both were due to speak at the International Physiological Conference of 1954. They stopped along the way—first in Paris, to meet Gwei-djen, who was still working with UNESCO (it would be another three years before she returned to Cambridge to become involved with the book full-time). The trio retired to a restaurant to open a bottle of celebratory champagne, three weeks in advance of the happy event. Joseph and Dorothy then boarded the Orient Express for a journey that Needham, railway mad, later pronounced a nearly total delight, despite atrocious weather and a broken heating system in their wagon-lit. The dining car served splendid food, and the steam engines that pulled the train were liveried and magnificent, with drivers who liked Needham’s adolescent enthusiasm for their craft.

  They stopped for a while in Mainz—Joseph making a point of visiting the “local Orientalists” to remind them courteously that their hero Johannes Gutenberg was (thanks to the discoveries at Dunhuang) not quite what they had long liked to suppose. Then the travelers stopped in Vienna for a weekend holiday, before pressing on to Hungary. Both gave well-received papers at the conference, though Joseph seemed rather distracted: his diary records that he had discovered a small steam railway in the forested hills above Buda, which was operated for children and only for fun, and he spent hours questioning the locomotive driver about the intricacies of its miniature workings.

  Once done with the congress, the other scientists from western Europe then left for their various homes or their next destinations in convoys of cars—but the Needhams did not go home. They had their driver take them back through Austria and Liechtenstein and via Basel on the Franco-Swiss border to Tours, in the Loire valley. They made their own way from this point to where Joseph planned to spend publication day: the small medieval town of Amboise, fifteen miles upriver.

  The couple chose the place for a number of reasons. The happiest of all was that Amboise was the town where Leonardo da Vinci had spent the final three years of his life—and Joseph Needham had said, only partly in jest, that he wanted to spend this most memorable day beside the house and the tomb of the most remembered Renaissance man who had ever lived.

  The title page of the first volume of
Needham’s monumental project. The title is a mild pun, suggesting that the reader starts his inquiry by turning his mind eastward.

  He wrote all this to Gwei-djen in Paris, also saying how much he missed her. In one letter he told her that when he had arrived the day before, Thursday, he had ventured into the château of Amboise, as he had done with her some years before—only this time he had gone to see what the two of them, in their rapture, had evidently missed: the flamboyant gothic chapel of Saint-Hubert, where Leonardo’s bones had been interred in the early sixteenth century.

  He wished she could be there to see it now, he wrote—not least because she would have been amused by an elderly Englishman whom Needham had met outside the church and who said he had overspent his holiday funds. To raise money to buy himself lunch, he had sold Needham one of his ties.

  Joseph and Dorothy marked the publishing event with dinner and a bottle of good local white wine, a 1947 Vouvray. On an impulse they then decided to visit the château at night. As he wrote to Gwei-djen the next morning,

  one ascends the illuminated spiral ramp to the strains of sixteenth century music from loudspeakers, and on the top level the buildings are all floodlit, especially the beautiful chapel on the wall where Leonardo da Vinci is buried. His statue among the trees, standing where the collegiate church once stood, is also finely illuminated. He is there now in solitary possession. There are no statues of the kings, queens and nobles who were so much more self-important when he was living!

  The public remembrance of great scientists, he concluded, could endure well beyond that of people whom mere accident of birth had made famous in their lifetimes. This had been the case with Leonardo. Perhaps, he suggested, it might one day be the same for him.

  But there was more to his choosing Amboise than merely rubbing shoulders with the memory of Leonardo. He was also burying himself in the depths of rural France because, in a sense, he was hiding. He was keeping out of sight because of all that had happened to him in the eight years since he’d returned from China.

  It had been a difficult time, largely because of his agreement to investigate the allegations concerning the Korean War. His reputation had been savaged. The security of his academic position had started to seem tenuous. His judgment had been called into question. He had been subjected, for the first time in his life, to an earthquake of criticism and insulting commentary. Some people called him a dupe, others a traitor, a few simply a crank. The gelling of his political convictions—not least his admiration for Mao—and his now unswerving support of the revolutionary left had also isolated him socially and intellectually from much of the British mainstream. He was in consequence lonely and unusually joyless.

  In Cambridge the senior members of his college were no longer as collegial as they might have been, nor as supportive. The glacial mood had started early. Needham had been elected a fellow in 1924, but because of his youth, callow manner, and evident eccentricity he had been less than entirely welcomed then. He was seen by some of the Edwardian throwbacks at the high table as unsound, however bright. So he spent most of his early time squirrelled away in the laboratories, or at home with his wife and in time his paramours, and then he was wont to go away for long sojourns in the East—making himself scarce, keeping out of the way of the grand, stiff-necked fellows who formed the college establishment.

  When he first returned from China in 1946 he found that the situation had changed a little; the mood had lightened somewhat. After his stay in Paris had ended in 1948, and when he had returned home flushed with the success of helping to create UNESCO, the atmosphere got even better, and his reception in the college had become almost congenial. But then five years later came his decision to lend his name and reputation to the International Scientific Commission in Beijing—which, as far as his standing in Cambridge was concerned, was a total disaster. Everything came tumbling down. He was excoriated in the press, denounced in Parliament, and shunned by many, and almost all sympathy that had survived in his college rapidly and steadily drained away.

  By this time few of the senior Cambridge figures on whose support he could usually count were still around. His greatest onetime champion, the biologist Sir William Bate Hardy, had died in 1931, as had Stanley Cook, the Semitist who had taught Needham much about the Jews of antiquity. The zoologist Munro Fox had retired early (having been run over by a horse-drawn bus) to pursue his private passion for the study of ostracods. Reginald Punnett,46 an expert on heredity in chickens, had retired to Somerset and seldom returned to Caius, other than to come up by train to inspect the exceptional clarets he kept in his private cellar there. Only Frederick “Chubby” Stratton, the memorably amusing astronomer and bachelor fixture of the senior combination room, remained a firm supporter. So aside from his settled family friendships—and with Wang Ling beside him, and Gwei-djen across the Channel in Paris—Needham spent much of the early 1950s in the college largely alone, and often shunned.

  He also did barely any teaching now, and though he had been officially excused from these duties, the exception rankled among some of his colleagues. Much of the uneasiness was motivated by envy that his life was so seemingly easy, in Cambridge terms. Much was also made of the casual way he had apparently invaded the turf of two other disciplines for which he had not the slightest qualification. He had no standing in the department of Chinese—and yet he pontificated on China at every opportunity. He had taken not one hour of formal training in history—and yet he had persuaded the university’s august and ancient press to let him write a great history of science. This deliberate straying into fields not his own was seen by some as merely impertinent, by others as positively threatening.

  So a lot was resting on the initial publications of Science and Civilisation in China. If the books were well received, then their reception alone might restore his good name and ensure his return to acceptance and academic respectability. But he could hardly be sure that the reviews would be good. He was only too aware that he was writing for an audience already highly prejudiced against China and the East, a group of skeptics among whom even the cleverest were bound by an almost unconscious certitude of the West’s cultural and intellectual supremacy. The very reason he had begun the project was to try to change people’s minds. But now he was not so certain that he could. The task had grown very substantially since he began his work—not least because popular antipathy toward China was, in the 1950s, founded on not one but now on two quite separate arguments, one of which had been added, with cruel irony, since he first had his basic idea for writing the book.

  In 1942—when he jotted down “Sci. in China—why not develop?”—the West was prejudiced against China for all the old, well-known reasons. China was thought to be backward, cruel, rigid, a place cut off from what Hegel had termed the world spirit. The prejudice was really quite simple, based essentially on racial dislike, fear, and cultural arrogance. Political ideology played little or no part in the antipathy: the Chinese were disdained because they were Chinese.

  But now, twelve years later, and to the shock and general dismay of westerners, Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party had settled itself firmly into power in Beijing. This new China—Red China—was to many in the West a fully certified public enemy, and was held in disdain, particularly by Washington, just as the Bolsheviks who ran the Soviet Union were disdained.

  There was thus a second reason for loathing China. Old-fashioned prejudice had now been joined by vehement anticommunism, a strident antipathy to Mao, to Zhou Enlai, and to their revolutionary cadres. Anyone supporting Red China was now seen as innately hostile to America. Supporting China had long seemed merely eccentric and wrongheaded. Supporting Communist China was, on the other hand, downright treachery.

  Needham’s left-wing sympathies were well-known; the anti-American conclusions of the report by his commission were still widely reviled; and even on normally liberal American university campuses the attitude toward him had now changed. He was now being quite widely criticized—not for h
is science, not for his history, and not for his intelligence, but for his politics, for his sympathies, and for his friends. And all that before a single word of his thesis—his essentially dispassionate, nonpolitical, and purely academic thesis—had been published.

  So for him to have written a book—a series of books, no less—that trenchantly challenged the traditionally prejudiced view of China, and that roundly supported China’s claim to a proper place in the story of the making of the world—was suddenly, from Needham’s point of view, fraught with risk. The reviews could be savage, and personally devastating.

  Moreover, the first volumes, as he had planned them, did little more than set out the thesis for the series. People might be tempted to wait, to see if the subsequent volumes—Volume III and the rest—would merit their full attention. There might be no reviews at all, perhaps none for some years yet, no final verdict, no vindication. And in that case the waiting would perhaps be an even greater agony.

  He was consumed by nerves, and understandably so. As the first volume was about to emerge, a part of him wanted desperately to hide—and for that purpose he chose Amboise. He had no idea how the world would react to his work, and judging by what had gone before, he feared the worst.

  But as it turned out, he need hardly have worried. Such reviews as did appear—and he was right; many reviewers decided to wait for future volumes before committing themselves—were truly extraordinary, all of them entirely positive. Despite his fears the world’s intellectual community, it seemed, actually cared very little about his politics. If he chose to support Mao and Zhou, and if that had gotten him into hot water with the Americans—well, this was still a superb work of scholarship. Ideological differences were set aside: a chorus of the most extravagant praise was sounded.