[Marxism] Joseph Needham biography

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2493
June/July/Aug 2008
OLD CHINA HAND
By BRYAN WALSH

The Man Who Loved China:
The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlo
by Simon Winchester
$27.95 List Price

The preeminent story of our time will not be the occupation of Iraq or 
the war on terror, but the shift of economic, technological, and 
geopolitical power to the East—specifically, China. Newspaper editors 
have coined a name for this story—“the rise of China”—but that’s not 
quite right. China isn’t rising the way the United States rose from a 
scattering of rustic colonies to a global superpower in two centuries, 
or the way Japan rose from an isolated island to the world’s 
second-largest economy in little more than half that time. Home to 1.3 
billion people, with a history measured in millennia, China isn’t in 
fact rising so much as returning to its rightful place as the fulcrum of 
the world.

It’s a story that Joseph Needham foresaw. As the nation was at its 
weakest in the first half of the last century—riven by civil war, 
partially occupied by Japan, dismissed by much of the West as 
backward—this British scientist and self-taught Sinologist saw the 
greatness of China’s past and the promise of its future. In his 
magisterial series Science and Civilisation in China (1954–2004), 
Needham intellectually rescued his beloved country. It was he who argued 
conclusively that gunpowder, paper, the compass, and printing originated 
in China. As Simon Winchester writes in his engaging new book, The Man 
Who Loved China, Needham “would discover, like no other outsider before 
or since, that the Chinese, far from existing beyond the mainstream of 
human civilization, had in fact created much of it.”

Needham was a remarkable scholar at the start of his long career, but 
none who knew him as a young Cambridge don in the ’20s would have 
guessed that his future lay in the East. He was a biochemist by 
training, but science was never enough to satisfy his roving mind. A 
polymath in the best British tradition, Needham was a talented linguist 
who could mentally translate his manuscripts from English to French and 
back, as well as a committed socialist whose politics would guide his 
life. He was also—much to Winchester’s delight, one suspects—a nudist, 
an enthusiastic practitioner of English folk dances, and a dedicated 
collector of mistresses.

This last trait was gently tolerated by his wife, Dorothy. It’s a good 
thing she did, both for Needham’s sake and for the course of his future 
studies: Before Needham fell in love with China, he fell in love with a 
woman, Lu Gwei-djen, a young biochemist who came to Cambridge in 1937. 
It was under Lu’s tutelage that Needham became obsessed with the Eastern 
nation. He became fluent in Mandarin and found himself embroiled in 
Sino-British politics. In the late ’30s, China was fighting off a 
Japanese invasion, but Western nations like Britain remained neutral. 
That would change with Pearl Harbor, and Needham would soon be on his 
way to the Chinese capital of Chongqing as a British diplomat.

It is in wartime China that Needham’s story—as well as Winchester’s 
writing—truly takes off. Chongqing, as Needham saw it, rose “like the 
prow of a ship, a great pyramid of jumbled rock and humanity.” But 
Needham wouldn’t stay in the capital long. He spent much of the war 
years traveling throughout China, defying the Japanese air force, bad 
roads, and flat tires while clocking more than thirty thousand miles in 
eleven expeditions. His ostensible purpose was to deliver supplies to 
China’s decimated scientific community, but Winchester makes it clear 
that Needham had grander motivations. In 1942, before he left for China, 
Needham scribbled a note: “Sci. in general in China—why not develop?” He 
envisioned a book on the history of science and technology in China, and 
throughout his wartime travels, Needham gathered evidence of the 
astounding rate at which ancient China had produced significant 
inventions—fifteen a century during the most productive years. In the 
far western city of Dunhuang, on what was once the Silk Road, he 
discovered that Chinese printers had been at work centuries before 
Gutenberg. “Here was a clear indication that China was no backward 
nation but for much of its great age a highly sophisticated 
civilization, the certain fount of at least this one human invention,” 
Winchester writes, “and quite possibly the fount of just about 
everything else important that was known to the outside world.”

After the war, Needham focused solely on his China research, and what he 
had planned as a relatively tidy ten-year project became the sprawling, 
twenty-four-volume Science and Civilisation in China. Though Needham’s 
reputation would suffer somewhat during the cold war (like many of his 
political stripe, he was far too slow to recognize just how catastrophic 
Mao Zedong’s rule was for China), his endeavor won universal acclaim. 
“He had worked single-handedly to change the way the people of the West 
looked on the people of the East,” Winchester writes. “He had succeeded, 
as few others are ever privileged to do, in making a significant and 
positive change to mankind’s mutual understanding.”

More straightforward than some of Winchester’s idiosyncratic recent 
books, such as his 2005 study of the 1906 California earthquake, The Man 
Who Loved China does justice to Needham’s impressive accomplishments. 
But what serves Winchester best is his appreciation--clearly of a piece 
with Needham’s own—of China’s true place in the world. Needham’s work 
was partly motivated by a desire to discover why, after lapping the West 
for centuries, China had stagnated scientifically from the 1400s on. 
This became known as “Needham’s question,” and the master himself was 
never able to answer it fully, positing that, in effect, the Chinese 
just stopped trying. But for Winchester, the question may be moot: China 
has left its slumber behind. He ends the book in the semisecret city of 
Jiuquan, China’s Cape Canaveral, where in 2003 the first Chinese 
astronaut was launched into space. At the entrance to the town, 
Winchester notes, is a giant billboard, in Chinese and English: without 
haste. without fear. we conquer the world.

China is back.

Bryan Walsh is a staff writer for Time magazine.

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