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

by Simon Winchester

  I have felt for many years that there is a great necessity today for a thorough reformation and modernization of the traditional theology of human sexuality. We are no longer living in patristic times, or the Middle Ages, and the new knowledge of itself which mankind has acquired since the Renaissance is something which the church must absorb in order to be able to exert the full force of its eternal message.

  The present movement for tolerance and acceptance of wide variations in human relationships is only another part of the same general struggle for socialism and against oppression, in which Thaxted has been in the forefront for half a century.

  Soon thereafter, and to hammer the point home, he made certain that he gave a rousing sermon at the memorial service for a celebrated homosexual member of Parliament, Tom Driberg, so that there should be no doubt as to his very public tolerance. He gave his last sermon a little more than a decade later, on the fourth Sunday after Trinity, in the summer of 1987: his theme then was “Greed and Capitalism.” Politically, nothing had changed.

  He still traveled, though his joints were beginning to creak. After a pause following the Korean War—in the mid-1950s he had felt that further trips to China would make his situation at home intolerable—he started going to China again. He was now one of the founding leaders of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), which he, the Bryans, and others had formed after their Britain-China Friendship Association collapsed in a welter of Stalinist recrimination. In the late 1960s, a visa obtained through SACU was just about the only way for a Briton to gain access to China; the young filmmaker David Attenborough was one of the first to do so. Needham remained its president for thirty-five years, and was able to get visas to China with ease—so long, his later critics pointed out, as he remained staunchly uncritical of the regime’s excesses.

  He flew back to China first in 1964, and found to his delight that he was to be greeted officially by the government, and by no less than Zhou Enlai, who treated him like an old friend. The economic privations of the time were very obvious to Needham—the aftereffects of the Great Leap Forward were painfully evident, though he assumed they were little more than the teething troubles of the new regime, and he returned to Cambridge with his faith unshaken.

  But in 1972 he went back again—and this time to a raw and very deeply altered China, just emerging from the incredible suffering of the Cultural Revolution. This time he was not so sure. He found himself deeply depressed because so few of his old friends were available for him; he was puzzled that some seemed to have disappeared altogether, often in unexplained and occasionally sinister-seeming circumstances. His guides in China that year were neither so helpful nor so friendly as before, and his freedom to travel was quite severely restricted. He was puzzled, almost hurt.

  His abiding love for the essence of China and its people remained intact, as it would for the rest of his life. But in the aftermath of what had so evidently altered the face and feeling of China now, he began for the first time to question the wisdom of the policies. He wondered, at first in silence and then in a series of essays, if Mao’s kind of socialism really was the answer—and he speculated in print as to whether some of the errors, if errors there were, might not have done terrible damage to the science for which China had so long been famous. One article in Nature in 1978, in which he called Mao’s policies toward science “disastrous,” attracted considerable attention: he seemed almost to be on the verge of breaking ranks—except that Mao had died two years before, making such criticism easier to express. Needham also issued a scathing public denunciation of the Gang of Four—the architects of the Cultural Revolution—but only after their fall, and after the new leadership in Beijing had condemned them. Criticism in Britain made him reply, weakly, that he was no China watcher, merely a historian of Chinese science.

  Both Needham, at sixty-four; and Zhou Enlai at sixty-six, were well on in middle age when they met again in Beijing in 1964, shortly before the outbreak of China’s Cultural Revolution, of which Needham was a moderately enthusiastic supporter.

  Mao and his acolytes had done their best to keep such a formidable ally on their side. During the journey he made to China in 1972 the leaders were entirely unaware of his seeming unease, and they behaved in an exceptionally good-natured way to the man they regarded as one of their most vocal British supporters. It was Mao’s last opportunity to be so friendly. One story from that visit (a story one would prefer not to think apocryphal, though it cannot be confirmed) perhaps sums up the relationship which had grown up between Needham and Mao in the quarter century since they had first become aware of each other in Chongqing.

  Needham was apparently invited, at very short notice, to come to Mao’s office on an “urgent matter of state business.” He dressed quickly, in a suit, and hurried along Chang’an Avenue to Zhongnanhai, the complex of lakeside palaces beside the Forbidden City where the Chinese leaders have their headquarters. Guards escorted him to Mao’s offices, where he found the chairman sitting in a relaxed mood, drinking tea.

  They exchanged pleasantries for a few moments. Then Mao got down to business. He spoke in slow and heavily accented Chinese, which Needham could barely understand. He was aware, said Mao, that Yuese, in his early years at Cambridge—Mao used Needham’s Chinese name, Li Yuese—had driven a fast car, a sports car called, Mao astonishingly remembered being told, an Armstrong-Siddeley. The perplexed Needham nodded his head. Yes, he had. He had loved cars, and still did.53

  “I thought so,” said Mao. “You are the only westerner I know well enough, and who knows about motor cars. So I have come to you, Yuese, to ask for a small piece of advice on an important matter of state business.”

  Needham straightened his back, waiting.

  “I am aware of developments in the outside world. I have to decide whether to permit my people”—Mao gestured expansively—“whether to allow my people to drive motor cars, or whether the bicycle is better for them. What, my dear Li Yuese, do you think?”

  Needham, amazed, paused. He thought for a moment—of the thousands of bicycles moving along Chang’an Avenue like a ceaseless sea, just a few yards away. He thought of the uncomplaining discipline of the riders, of the near-silence of the onrush of people, of the occasional flash of elegance as a beautiful young woman would glide past on her Flying Pigeon, swanlike and lovely. He was transported. He was in a reverie.

  Mao coughed. His visitor snapped back into reality. He was in the office of the chairman of the Communist Party of China, the guiding light, the Great Helmsman of the mightiest nation on earth. He had been asked a question. A reply was needed.

  “Well, Mr. Chairman,” responded Needham, stuttering slightly. “To be honest with you, I find that back in Cambridge where I live, my very old bicycle is perfectly satisfactory for almost all of my needs.”

  He was going to say more, to add that perhaps in a major industrial nation it might indeed be better to use cars, and it might be beneficial to allow private citizens to drive. But Mao was grinning. He had heard what he wanted to hear. A decision was in the making.

  “So, Yuese, you who like China so much find the bicycle perfectly satisfactory?” He rubbed his hands together, then spread them apart. He had made up his mind.

  “Right, then. Bicycles it is!”

  And with that Needham was invited to leave, and he emerged blinking into the sunset onto an avenue that was jammed solid with the two-wheeled conveyances of the evening traffic jam. He suddenly felt he had made some contribution, in some strange way, to the future of all of these people—at least for the next few years.

  No record of the conversation in Zhongnanhai exists. Maybe it never took place. But two things are certain. Joseph Needham did occasionally ride a bicycle. And China is now well on the way to becoming the world’s greatest producer—and soon the world’s greatest consumer—of automobiles.

  Whatever Mao said or did not say to Joseph Needham on that summer’s day in 1972, he was dead four years later, and his successor
, Deng Xiaoping, was to be bent single-mindedly on bringing China into the forefront of the modern world. And if that meant, as far as transportation was concerned, the wholesale scrapping of millions of Flying Pigeons and a nation shackled to a lifetime of pollution and traffic jams and countless miles of new roads to be built, then so be it.

  Throughout this time there was a cascade of honors. In 1971 Needham was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy, so that now, in common only with the philosopher Karl Popper and the historian Margaret Gowing, he was a fellow of both the Academy and the Royal Society. Honorary degrees, academe’s device for publicly declaring the gratitude of the intellectual community, began to be offered: Cambridge got in early, and then Brussels, Norwich, Uppsala, Toronto, Salford, the two main universities in Hong Kong, Newcastle, Chicago (the U.S. government finally giving him a visa to permit him to receive it), Hull, Wilmington (North Carolina), Surrey, and Peradeniya University (outside Kandy, in the central tea-estate hills of Sri Lanka). (The last reflected his keen interest in what was then Ceylon, when he chaired the country’s University Policy Commission in 1958).

  There was an oddly chilling coda to Needham’s brief visit to Chicago in the spring of 1978. He had been invited to give three public lectures at Northwestern University. For his second talk he decided on the topic “Gunpowder: Its Origins and Uses.” One of those who came to hear his lecture was a wild-haired loner of a mathematician, a tragic, brilliant man named Ted Kaczynski.

  A short while earlier, professors at a Chicago branch of the University of Illinois had summarily rejected a brief essay Kaczynski had written on the evils of modern society, and one mathematician there had heard him mutter, bitterly, that he would eventually “get even” with those who had spurned him. On May 24, six weeks after sitting through Needham’s lecture, Kaczynski fashioned a wooden-cased explosive device made of gunpowder and match heads, and mailed it to one of the professors who had rejected him. It was intercepted, exploded, and injured a campus security guard.

  There were no clues as to who was the perpetrator of the crime, and the incident marked the beginning of an extraordinary, bizarre, and frightening period in modern American history. Over the next two decades Ted Kaczynski, who lived alone in a remote shack in the mountains of Montana, went on to send waves of carefully made and ever more lethal bombs to academics, killing three people and injuring more than twenty. The press and the FBI called him the Unabomber. He remained at large until his arrest in April 1996.

  Few knew at the time that he may have initially been schooled in his deadly craft, though entirely unwittingly, by Joseph Needham. One can only wonder what would have happened—or might not have happened—had the State Department’s ban on Needham remained in place, denying the Unabomber the opportunity to hear him and to learn about early Chinese techniques for the manufacture of explosives.

  In addition to Needham’s collection of degrees there were medals galore, to join his Order of China’s Brilliant Star—which the British government still prohibited him from wearing at official functions. There were memberships and fellowships in bodies and institutes and academies from India to Denmark and China and then finally, once the State Department had relaxed its ban on his entry in 1978, from the great American organizations: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Historical Association, and the Yale Chapter of Sigma Xi.

  His roving eye remained undimmed, even as he aged. There was much alarm in the mid-1970s when he became captivated by a distinguished Canadian Chinese woman, H. Y. Shih, who was a former director of the National Gallery of Canada. There was even talk of a divorce, and a marriage. Under great pressure from all his friends—including a joint attack from both Dorothy and Gwei-djen, who acted in what old Chinese families would recognize as the “concert of the concubinage”—the affair eventually fizzled, to widespread relief.

  And through it all, the book. During the ten years of his mastership four more volumes were published—one on mechanical engineering; two on chemistry; and in 1975 the mighty 400,000-word tome that is generally reckoned the finest and most comprehensive, the famous Volume IV, Part 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics. Seven volumes were now out on the shelves; ten more were in the process of being written, edited, and proofread; another ten were still in Needham’s overfurnished but impeccably organized mind.

  And the chorus of admiration for the works was becoming ever more enthusiastic. George Steiner, the critic and public intellectual whose imprimatur was at the time perhaps more sought after than any other, remarked that in Science and Civilisation in China Needham had re-created a world of extraordinary density and presence:

  He is literally recreating, recomposing an ancient China, a China forgotten in some degree by Chinese scholars themselves and all but ignored by the west. The alchemists and metal-workers, the surveyors and court astronomers, the mystics and military engineers of a lost world come to life, through an intensity of recapture, of empathic insight which is the attribute of a great historian, but even more of a great artist.

  The books could be favorably compared, wrote Steiner in a review in 1973, with À la recherche du temps perdu—for both “Proust and Needham have made of remembrance both an act of moral justice and of high art.”

  An artist was commissioned to capture Needham’s image, for a painted portrait in the Hall at Caius. Needham decided to wear his long blue Chinese gown, the color blue having been regarded in imperial days in China as recognition of a high level of achievement, matching the high level of achievement in Britain that was suggested by the portrait itself. The older portraits under which members of the college dine are of ruffled, velvet-clad divines; Needham is among the more recent, and above him in his eastern getup are stained-glass windows depicting, not people, but the actual achievements made by other Caians—a colored-glass Venn diagram, and a delicately rendered double helix of DNA, conceptualized by Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Caius College’s Francis Crick.

  Needham’s retirement from the mastership came in 1976, and with it came the beginnings of a slow and steady downward spiral. For the first time Needham was beginning to realize—and, moreover, to admit—that he might not manage to cover the entirety of Chinese science within the limits of his lifetime. Perhaps, he wondered out loud, he might have bitten off more than he could chew. It was clear that he needed help—and not simply the kind of assistance that Wang Ling and Gwei-djen had been able to offer. He needed someone who could perhaps write an entire volume, could look after an entire topic of Chinese scientific history on his or her own.

  Needham was sufficiently distinguished in 1963 to have his portrait painted in oils for the Caius College Hall three years before he was elected Master. The combination of slide rule and scholar’s robe suggests his dual fascination with East and West.

  Though he gritted his teeth about having to delegate, he eventually did: Francesca Bray was the first to be handed one entire subject (agriculture, eventually becoming Volume VI, Part 2). But T. H. Tsien’s Volume V, Part 1, about paper and printing, actually came out first, in 1985, and with a note from Needham publicly admitting that in freeing himself from the burden of sole authorship, he had now reached a turning point. The project was still his—he was its architect and the builder of the first courses of brickwork. But the upperworks, parapets, dome—these would be the work of others. Life was too short for it to be otherwise.

  Moreover, he had now reached a venerable stage of life. He was seventy-six when he left the Caius mastership; eighty-five, frail, and bowed when Tsien’s volume on printing came out; then two years short of his ninetieth birthday, and ailing, when Francesca Bray’s volume on agriculture emerged. The wisdom of years was prompting him to envisage just how the series would progress when he was no longer competent to write it, and also how it could progress when he was no longer around even to direct it.

  According to a tradition at Gonville and Caius, those who are most intimately associated with the college will in their lifetime make use of tw
o ancient gates built in the college walls. They would enter as undergraduates through what had been known for 700 years as the Gate of Humility; and at death, if their life had brought distinction, fame, or both, they would leave through another, more ornate and topped by a sundial. Called the Gate of Honour, it was seldom opened, and then only for momentous occasions. Joseph Needham’s appointment with this second gate would now be not too long in coming, he suspected.

  And yet he was content: those whom he had gathered around him in these closing years would be sure to finish everything, come what may. Cambridge University Press was in full agreement: Science and Civilisation in China was too bright a jewel in the publisher’s crown—in Cambridge’s crown, in the nation’s crown—for anyone ever to entertain any thought of abandoning it.

  Needham and Gwei-djen moved adroitly to ensure the lasting physical security of the vast collection of books and manuscripts they had accumulated. Needham had long before persuaded the college that two rooms were necessary to house the project, and after a battle royal in the mid-1950s (for rooms in Oxford and Cambridge colleges are the scarcest of commodities, and one has to be of the greatest distinction to be permitted more than one), he was given the right to use both his old room, K-1, and K-2 next door. He installed Gwei-djen in the latter, their books in both. The crush of bookcases became unmanageable: it was still necessary for research assistants to be very small, the better to squeeze along the tiny corridors between these shelves.