Joseph Needham never fully worked out the answers. 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 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.
The sum of their conclusions is that China, basically, stopped trying.
The Chinese could have achieved so much. Had they, for example, been equipped with “the European mania for tinkering and improving,” as the sinologist Mark Elvin put it, they could probably have made an efficient spinning machine in the seventeenth century. It might have been trickier for them to make a steam engine, “but it should not have posed insuperable difficulties to a people who had been building double-acting piston flame-throwers in the Song dynasty. The crucial point is that nobody tried.”
Just why the Chinese stopped trying is a question sinologists will argue and debate until the Great Wall crumbles into sand. Some say it is because there was never a mercantile class in China to which clever young Chinese could aspire. For centuries the summit of a student’s ambition was always to join the bureaucracy, rather than to enter a nonexistent world of competition and improvement—and absent this driving force, complacency ruled, incentive atrophied, and mediocrity became the norm.
Some others point to the immense size of a state that for long periods of its history was culturally unified into one vast, homogeneous bloc. Europe, by contrast, has always been packed with jostling and warring peoples and states who have collectively experienced hundreds of years of competing ambitions. If Italy needed to produce a better cannon than the French, then its technologists were cajoled into trying to do so. If British navigation equipment was more sophisticated than that invented by the Germans, it had a powerful advantage at sea, and Germany would have been bound to try to better it.
But there was no such intramural competition in ancient China, except perhaps during those periods when the country was racked by conflict and civil war. More commonly the soldiers in Urumchi used the same weapons as those in Guangzhou, and a Manchu farmer used the same kind of plow as his opposite number in Kashgar. Plenty of technology existed abroad—but the Chinese had so little need to compete that there was no driving pressure to make things better and better over the centuries.
Others blame the endless climate of Chinese totalitarianism—whether imposed by emperors or by the Communists—that also acted to sap the will of the entrepreneur and the innovator. Étienne Balazs, a Hungarian scholar who was perhaps the greatest twentieth-century student of Chinese government, wrote once:
It is the State that kills technological progress in China—not only in the sense that it nips in the bud anything that goes against or seems to go against its interests, but also by the customs implanted inexorably by the raison d’État. The atmosphere of routine, of traditionalism, and of immobility, which makes any innovation, or any initiative that is not commanded and sanctioned in advance, suspect, is unfavour-able to the spirit of free inquiry.
Still others, in the way of academics, insist that the question itself is flawed—and that rather than asking why modern science did not develop in China, one should be asking why it did develop in Europe. Asking for an explanation of a negative, they say, sets one on a pointless mission.
Whatever the reason, the phenomenon may be seen in due course as more of a hiatus, more of a hiccup in China’s long history, than a permanent condition. Today’s China has now so profoundly changed yet again—has become so rich, energetic, freewheeling, awesome, and spectacular—that the situation which engaged Joseph Needham and the small army of sinologists who have followed in his footsteps may itself well have come to a natural end.
It seems abundantly clear that creativity, true inventiveness, is starting to flow in China once again, with the new prosperity of the country. No longer is China the sinkhole of decay and desuetude that it was as recently as twenty years ago. Nowadays, in every field—in science and technology on the one hand, in literature and the plastic arts on the other—the new China is entering a time of intense activity and entrepreneurial energy.
If this continues to be the case, then perhaps some people will conclude that the “Needham question” never really needed to be asked in the first place. Perhaps China did dim its lights for three or four centuries. Maybe the Qing dynasty, and the half century of turmoil that followed it, will never go down in China’s history as a golden era, will never be another Tang dynasty or another Song dynasty. But for China that hardly matters: the country has so immensely long a history that a few hundred years when things were shabbier and duller than usual will, in the broad sweep of things, hardly signify. Scholars will continue to gnaw at the problem—but in that the intellectual dry spell now seems unlikely to spread into China’s future, their quest may turn out to be quite fruitless.
A more interesting question will be this: how quickly and competently will the new China now manage to capitalize on its early, historical promise? Needham expressed the greatest confidence that in time it would. And he always knew that the great strength of his books lay precisely in their ability to catalog what that early promise was, and so to indicate to a fascinated world just where and how the new China and the new Chinese will now seek their best advantage. The books present a road map—to show where China has been, and where it is going next.
The third volume of Science and Civilisation in China—the first “real” volume, issued in 1959, in which Needham begins to describe the early practical successes of Chinese science—is devoted to mathematics and, in large part, to China’s age-old fascination with the stars. Needham quotes as his epigraph an eminent Viennese sinologist, Franz Kühnert, who wrote in 1884 that
another reason why many Europeans consider the Chinese such barbarians is on account of the support they give to their Astronomers—people regarded by our civilized Western mortals as completely useless. Yet there they rank with heads of Departments and Secretaries of State. What frightful barbarism!
Maybe, say some people, Franz Kühnert made a mistake, meaning astrology rather than astronomy. But it doesn’t really matter. The essential point remains the same. From antiquity, the Chinese were enthralled by the heavens and by heavenly phenomena, and they came to know, map, and chart the stars and planets in exceptional detail, centuries before any watchers of the skies in the West. The star charts that Needham was to study at the Dunhuang caves figure prominently in his studies: they show how obsessed China was with the universe, with the big picture, with the broad sweep of history and geography. The charts show that they were a people who, as Needham had been advised to conduct himself so very long ago, were able to think big, to “think in oceans.”
There is a place in the far west of the country, the desert, where today, and quite unexpectedly, one finds the Chinese doing exactly that. It is a place to which Needham traveled when he was on his way to the Dunhuang caves, driving his wheezing truck along the old Silk Road. These days the Silk Road is a modern four-lane highway for much of its early length. But then after 1,000 miles or so the Great Wall, which runs beside it on the northern side, begins to peter out. The roadway narrows, then gets more rough. The Gobi Desert sweeps to the road’s very curb, and with jagged mountain ranges to the south and the empty desert ahead, the Silk Road can at this point suddenly look and feel just as lonely as it did in the old days, when Arab cameleers and Mediterranean traders would tread its path, on their way to Medina and Antioch and the outside world.
And then, two hours beyond Rewi Alley’s village of Shandan, one comes on a town that looks decidedly neither of the desert nor of the far frontier.
It is called Jiuquan, and it is known in popular legend as the place which grew the first rhubarb, and as the town where an early Jesuit explorer, Bento de Goes, was robbed and died destitute at the beginning of the seventeenth century. There is no evident history at Jiuquan now—no plaque
celebrating rhubarb, no grave for Father Goes—but there is a town as modern and gleaming as any example of American exurbia. In the gray and gritty wilderness of the southern Gobi Desert there are suddenly scores of tall new buildings, each the experiment of some wildly adventurous young architect. There are wide boulevards, soaring overpasses, and, perched above acres of scrubby wasteland, construction cranes busily hauling up yet more apartment skyscrapers for a population that, to judge by the ghostly nature of the place, has evidently still to arrive.
Jiuquan is a space center—one of China’s three most important launch pads for satellites, buried deep on the flat, sunny fringes of the Gobi Desert. It was first occupied in 1958—just thirteen years after Needham passed by.
In those ultrasecret times this was the site of the first tests of surface-to-surface missiles for the strategic artillery divisions of the People’s Liberation Army. The first nuclear-capable missile was sent into the stratosphere from Jiuquan in 1966. These days the pad, far out of sight of the road, launches satellites commercially, claiming a 100 percent success rate. In October 2003 the people of Jiuquan sent Yang Lingwei, the first Chinese astronaut, into space, and helped make him a national hero. For the first half century of its life Jiuquan was off-limits to all except its employees and party patrons; now, since Yang’s fourteen successful orbits, the town and the launch center have been opened to tourists. But these tourists are Chinese nationals only. No foreigners may come. Not yet.
Joseph Needham would have wished to spend time at Jiuquan—if for no other reason than to see the sign that rises on a giant billboard at the entrance to the town. It is written in huge scarlet characters, and in enormous letters, in both Chinese and English. It proclaims a sentiment to which Needham readily subscribed, from the moment in 1948 when he first began writing his book, perhaps even from when he first went to China in 1943, perhaps from when he first met Lu Gwei-djen, and she introduced him to her language, in 1937.
The sign, simply and starkly, states: “Without Haste. Without Fear. We Conquer the World.”
After its 5,000 years of patient waiting, watching, and learning, this is at last China’s appointed time.
And Joseph Needham would not be dismayed by that; nor would he be the slightest bit surprised.
Appendix I: Chinese Inventions and Discoveries with Dates of First Mention
The mere fact of seeing them listed brings home to one the astonishing inventiveness of the Chinese people.
—JOSEPH NEEDHAM, 1993, PUBLISHED 2004
From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume VII, Part 2
Abacus
AD 190
Acupuncture
580 BC
Advisory vessels
3rd century BC
Air-conditioning fan
AD 180
Alcohol made from grain by a special fermentation process
15th century BC
Algorithm for extraction of square and cube roots
1st century AD
Anatomy
11th century AD
Anchor, nonfouling, stockless
1st century AD
Anemometer
3rd century AD
Antimalaria drugs
3rd century BC
Arcuballista, multiple-bolt
320 BC
Arcuballista, multiple-spring
5th century AD
Asbestos woven into cloth
3rd century BC
Astronomical clock drive
AD 120
Axial rudder
1st century AD
Ball bearings
2nd century BC
Balloon principle
2nd century BC
Bean curd
AD 100
Bell, pottery
3rd millennium BC
Bellows, double-acting piston-tuned bronze
6th century BC
Belt drive
5th century BC
Beriberi, recognition of
AD 1330
Blast furnace
3rd century BC
Blood, distinction between arterial and venous
2nd century BC
Blood, theory of circulation
2nd century BC
Boats and ships, paddle-wheel
AD 418
Bomb, cast-iron
AD 1221
Bomb, thrown from a trebuchet
AD 1161
Book, printed, first to be dated
AD 868
Book, scientific, printed
AD 847
Bookcase, vertical axis
AD 544
Bookworm repellent
Bowl, bronze water-spouting
3rd century BC
Bread, steamed
Bridges, releasable
4th century BC
Bridges, iron-chain suspension
6th century AD
Bridges, Li Chhun’s segmental arch
AD 610
Bronze, high tin, for mirror production
Bronze rainbow teng (camphor still)
1st century BC
Calipers
AD 9
Camera obscura, explanation of
AD 1086
“Cardan” suspension
140 BC
Cast iron
5th century BC
Cast iron—malleable
4th century BC
Cereals, preservation of stored
1st century BC
Chain drive
AD 976
Chess
4th century BC
Chimes, stone
9th century BC
Chopsticks
600 BC
Clocks, sand
AD 1370
Clocks, Su Sung’s
AD 1088
Clockwork escapement of Yi Xing and Liang Lingzan
AD 725
Coal, as a fuel
1st century AD
Coal, dust, briquettes from
1st century AD
Coinage
9th century BC
Collapsible umbrella and other items
5th century BC
Comet tails, observation of direction of
AD 635
Compass, floating fish
AD 1027
Compass, magnetic needle
AD 1088
Compass, magnetic, used for navigation
AD 1111
Cooking pots, heat economy in
3rd millennium BC
Crank handle
1st century BC
Crop rotation
6th century BC
Crossbow
5th century BC
Crossbow, bronze triggers
300 BC
Crossbow, grid sight for
1st century AD
Crossbow, magazine
13th century AD
Dating of trees by number of rings
12th century AD
Decimal place value
13th century BC
Deep drilling and use of natural gas as fuel
2nd century BC
Diabetes, association with sweet and fatty foods
1st century BC
Dial and pointer
3rd century AD
Differential pressure
Disease, diurnal rhythms in
2nd century BC
Diseases, deficiency
3rd century AD
Dishing of carriage wheel
Distillation, of mercury
3rd century BC
Dominoes
AD 1120
Downdraft
1st century BC
Dragon kiln
2nd century AD
Draw loom
1st century AD
Drum carriage
110 BC
Diked/poldered fields
1st century BC
Ephedrine
2nd century AD
Equal temperament, mathematical formulation of
AD 1584
Equilibrium, theory of
4th century BC
Erosion and sedimentary deposition, knowledge of
AD 1070
Esculentist movement (edible plants for time of famine)
AD 1406
Ever-normal granary system
AD 9
Fertilizers
2nd century BC
Firecrackers
AD 290
Firelance
AD 950
Flame test
Flamethrower (double-acting force pump for liquids)
AD 919
Folding chairs
3rd century AD
Free reed
1000 BC
Fumigation
7th century BC
Furnace, reverberatory
1st century BC
Gabions
3rd century BC
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Page 29
