Giving Justice Back to China--Dr. Joseph Needham And the History of Science and Civilisation in China

Joseph Needham was born in 1900, so looking back over the work of his life is like viewing the history of the twentieth century. This is especially so concerning the relation-ship between East and West over this period, with all the acceptance and discrimination, understanding and confusion that has been involved. That we can re-evaluate this whole era from our standpoint at the end of this century and in a time of great upheaval makes the task even more fascinating.

"Why is there no science in Chinese culture?"--this kind of question seems unavoidably anachronistic today, largely thanks to Joseph Needham and his collaborators who have spent more than half a century looking at all the evidence concerned. Now, no matter whether in East or West, most people can understand the scientific achievements of ancient and medieval China and how far China was ahead of the West.

The year 1937 was the watershed in Needham's life. Before this he had already become a renowned scientist, having received his doctorate at Cambridge University and become a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1924. In the same year he married his first wife, Dorothy Moyle. The couple were both famous embryologists throughout the Western World and later were to become the only married couple to be elected members of Britain's prestigious Royal Society, apart from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert!

From 1930 Needham published numerous pioneering works in the field of embryology and his prestigious career in the world of biology continued until 1937, when suddenly "fell in love" with China. According to Needham, that was the year three Chinese research students came to Cambridge. That they appeared to be "better than Westerners" in the laboratory gave rise to his curiosity: "They mentally seemed no different to myself, so why had not China developed a scientific tradition?" He was to spend the rest of his life trying to answer this question.

In 1942 Needham became Scientific Counsellor at the British Embassy in Chung-king where he directed the Sino-British Science Cooperation Office. This gave him the opportunity to collect source materials, travel widely and pursue his enquiries with scholars and craftsmen and formally begin his writing.

In fact European sinologists in the early nineteenth century had previously paid attention to ancient Chinese astronomy and tried to trace its origins to Babylon, Arabia, India or Iran. But there were also scholars who were open enough not to exclude the possibility that it was a home-grown Chinese phenomenon.

Moreover, from 1911 to the Anti-Japanese War, Chinese scholars had themselves begun to exalt the achievements of ancient Chinese science and technology, especially just before the war. Professor Ho Peng-yoke, a member of the Academia Sinica and present director of the Needham Research Institute, says that at that time there was great interest among scholars in traditional science and technology partly for reasons that were not strictly academic: China's international position had declined drastically and she was backwards economically, technologically and militarily. In addition to this the condescension of Western and Japanese scholars stirred up an intellectual "war to defend culture," which involved working hard to glorify the achievements of ancient Chinese science and technology.

Unfortunately the results of this movement were not taken seriously internationally and even failed to draw much Chinese attention. That was until Joseph Needham applied his scientific fame and superhuman determination to his massive-scale research into a comparison of Eastern and Western science. Only then did people pay attention and the history of Chinese science and technology came to achieve international recognition and formal status as an academic discipline.

A scholar close to Needham analyses the reasons that he was able to achieve this huge work as being due to a combination of factors that would be hard to find in any other person. First, of course, it goes back to the breadth of his knowledge and his astonishing resoluteness and vitality. Secondly, although Cambridge did not support him financially or spiritually, only the academic tradition of Cambridge could tolerate having a master of a medical college who did not teach or do research but only concentrated on pursuing his own interests.

Needham's first wife, Dorothy Moyle, was also a great support to him. She was originally also an embryologist but let her husband put all his energy into the history of Chinese science. With no children he put all the inheritance from his parents into his writing and research. Dorothy was the elder of the two but accompanied him until her death in 1987 at the age of ninety-two.

His other lifelong companion and helper has been his present wife, Dr. Lu Gwei-djen. In one of his own poems Needham once described his main collaborator as "The Explainer, the Antithesis: The assurance of a link No separation can break." The story of Lu Gwei-djen's assistance and accompaniment of Needham has been that of one of the best working combinations that would be hard to find elsewhere.

These fortuitous and unusual conditions can go some way towards explaining the monumental scale of Needham's achievements. If you want to be clear about the innovative nature of his work, however, then it must be seen in the context of the European academic world in the early part of this century.

Needham began writing Science and Civilisation in China in the 1930s, a time when the history of science was still a relatively new subject. After the experience of World War One Europe was in a state of gradual decline. After the experience of the war and the destructive potential of modern weaponry, a few perceptive scientists not surprisingly began to question the centuries-old optimism held by the West towards science, hoping to overcome the crisis by researching into the history of their discipline.

Joseph Needham can be counted as one of the first of these critics. Yet he was unlike the typical historian of science who tended to assume that science was a product of European civilization and who was not willing to recognize that other cultures might have made contributions, either directly or indirectly. On the contrary. Needham used a comparative-historical approach to science which looked anew at its spread and transmission, especially that of ancient and medieval China.

The general Western view of China at this time was still that of the image of extreme weakness which resulted from the Opium Wars. As for China having contributed to science, the worst kind of historian said that China basically had nothing that could properly be called scientific civilization. Those who were slightly better informed announced that China had only a humanistic kind of science but no natural science. In parallel with the arrogance of Chinese people in the Ch'ing dynasty, any ancient evidence that could not be blotted out was merely explained away as being an abberation for a people who were not suited to such things. At most, the Chinese could be credited with a kind of artisanship that did not measure up to the level of theoretical science.

The comparatively better known theories of that time, such as that of F. Northrop, said that Asian people were more intuitive and aesthetic and thus were more celebrated for their artistic manifestations. Westerners, on the other hand, were seen to be more theoretical and empirical, thus their contributions to science were greater. In a similar vein, the great Albert Einstein, although he did not know much about China, also said that if the "philosophical" Chinese had achieved anything scientific then it would have surprised him much more than their evident lack of achievement.

Even the Chinese philosopher Feng Yu-lan also wrote a large work in the 1930s on "Why China has no Science." Another historian of science, C. Gillispie, was concerned about this question for different reasons--seeing that those non-Western peoples who had not come under the influence of Christianity could have been left with no sense of responsibility to humanity. He was now afraid that as soon as they got hold of Western science and technology the consequences would be unimaginable: "If the Chinese start brandishing bombs, then what?"

It was in this environment that Needham used his prestige as a famous Western scientist. He not only stressed to those around him that "bombs were originally invented in China" but even suggested that if the Chinese had not invented gunpowder and cannon then the feudal warlords of medieval Europe would never have lost their castles, feudalism would not have been dissolved and the following social changes--the rise of the bourgeoisie and the scientific revolution--might not have happened.

In his Science and Civilisation in China and other works, Needham untiringly and meticulously ploughed through the mountain of Chinese and Western historical evidence, one by one comparing the dates at which innovations appeared and the possibilities of their transmission across cultures. He then proposed that apart from the examples of the three great Chinese inventions of gunpowder, the magnetic compass and printing, there was a long list of other things invented and transmitted by the Chinese, from the recording of sunspots and the mechanical clock to methods of harnessing horses, water mills, ships, refining steel, boring wells, suspension bridges, rudders, immunology and many other things. Every one of these had contributed in some way to the rise of modern science.

Needham separated off modern science from the time of Galileo from what he sees as ancient and medieval science and he took modern science to be "world science" rather than "Western science." For him, the Chinese contribution to present-day biology, chemistry, astronomy and physics cannot easily be ignored.

In 1961, at a conference on the history of science at Oxford University, Needham once insisted loudly: ". . . Let us throw away this kind of intellectual arrogance and not again praise everything we produced as making us the enlightened race. Let us be proud of the fact that modern science was born only in Europe but let us not take this as an eternal patent. Because it was born in the age of Galileo, modern science is the enlightened goddess of the whole of humanity, not divided by race, color, creed or territory. It is a movement for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity. Anybody can have the necessary requirements and anybody can take part. It is the modern science of all humanity! It is not Western science!"

Needham's well-known "one family under heaven" philosophy is clear in this speech. The idea can be seen as early as 1946 in the poem that has already been quoted, where he sees Chung and Hsi; China and Europe, as symphonies with the same basic melodies but with different scores. The same poem finishes with a quote from The Book of Rites that, "All under Heaven shall be One Community." The activities of his life after that time have been rather like a search to prove the truth of this ideal.

Of course the idea of a global family is a beautiful one, but Needham's mission to prove the scientific merits of Chinese culture could not live comfortably with the arrogant idea of Western superiority that had come down from the seventeenth century. When the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China was published in 1954, Needham's humanistic aspirations were still confronted by two established bodies of opinion.

Needham's successor, Professor Ho Peng-yoke, points out that at that time a few classical sinologists could not help feeling that the history of Chinese science should be their own academic territory. They were curious about how a Cambridge authority on embryology could produce such a work. Professor Ho points out that the thought of flaunting his brilliance in front of the sinologists had not occurred to Needham, who was merely in genuine pursuit of his own interest.

Yet Needham was, in fact, also on a collision course with the Cambridge school of historians. At that time the orthodox Western view of history held by such people was that European culture had grown out of that of classical Greece to become the center of world civilization--areas such as China were hardly to be taken very seriously. An example of this was when the celebrated Cambridge historian of science. Herbert Butterfield, took up his pen against the sinologists when one of them had dared to claim that "China cannot be excluded from the mainstream of history."

The first volume of Science and Civilisation in China was an introduction to Chinese history, geography and philology and did not yet raise the subject of science. Two years later the second volume went on to discuss the history of philosophy and ideas--both volumes were fiercely criticized. At Princeton, C. Gillispie condemned Needham for looking at the history of Chinese science from a Marxist point of view. Other historians still insisted that China lacked a tradition of logic and experiment, so it was mistaken to try to find scientific thought there.

Then, in 1959, the third volume came out on the subjects of mathematics, astronomy and geology. According to Professor Ho, because the subject of this book was so specialized the majority of sinologists could not understand it. Moreover, as the scientists were not familiar with Chinese language and culture they came round to the view that the category of this work was certainly Needham's speciality and the best field in which he could apply his great breadth of learning. In this way not only did his critics became fewer but he came to be acclaimed by public opinion.

In light of this growing support, the publisher of Science and Civilisation in China agreed to expand the project by incorporating new volumes within the seven books originally planned. This in effect left the scale of the project without limitations and after ten years it was still being worked on. As Needham grew older people began to wonder whether the master would ever finish the task he had set himself.

Needham now thinks that he will not finish the great project himself. Driven on by his desire "To give people justice who did not have it before," however, he has made arrangements for other people to take up his work and put right what he sees as the great wrong committed by the West in viewing China as a land without science.

Needham's ideal of a global family, his desire to correct the mistaken views of the West and his deep love of China have unavoidably left Needham open to charges of prejudice. In earlier years he made the mistake of comparing Mao Tse-tung to Plato's philosopher king--obviously an extreme case of utopianism.

It has also been said that during the Cultural Revolution, when scientific research and publications had all but ceased in mainland China, a visitor to the Needham Research Institute brought along a mainland Chinese medical journal. Apart from one article related to the subject of optic acupuncture, the journal contained only politics and ideology. Needham's reaction to this was merely to say that it was, "better to have something than nothing at all," which Professor Ho sees as an example of his magnanimity.

Joseph Needham's life spans a century that has seen the optimistic self-confidence of scientism give way to the scepticism of the anti-science movement and the rise of environmentalism. It has also seen the distant Marxist paradise give way first to the East-West divide and finally to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ending of the Cold War. On the one hand we may reflect on our misfortune in having to witness the pollution of nature and global warming--yet we are fortunate to have escaped the Marxist experimental laboratory. As the last chapter of the twentieth century dramatically unfolds we can look back at Needham's contribution to the increase in understanding and respect between civilisations and see the story of his beliefs and activities as without doubt the moving biography of a humanistic scientist.

[Picture Caption]

This portrait of Needham hangs in the Institute.

The cover of this volume of his Science and Civilisation in China features ancient Chinese portraits.

Needham's recreation of an ancient Chinese scientific instrument.

It was only during the early modern era that the development of science and technology in China ceased to advance. This is the observatory on. Mt. Tzuchin near Nanking.

Prof. Ho Peng-yoke has already become Joseph Needham's successor as new Director of the N.R.I.

This close-up taken by the photographer of the Smithsonian Institute, Wa shington D.C., is Needham's favourite.

An important part of Needham's research has involved the construction of working models.

This portrait of Needham hangs in the Institute.

The cover of this volume of his Science and Civilisation in China features ancient Chinese portraits.

Needham's recreation of an ancient Chinese scientific instrument.

It was only during the early modern era that the development of science and technology in China ceased to advance. This is the observatory on. Mt. Tzuchin near Nanking.

Prof. Ho Peng-yoke has already become Joseph Needham's successor as new Director of the N.R.I.

An important part of Needham's research has involved the construction of working models.