The Man Who Loved China (35 page)

For silk, tea, bureaucracy, and the early invention of the compass as such do not make China what it is. What makes China different is the case-hardened sense of inner certitude that this vast array of invention has given to it.

Joseph Needham acknowledged and confirmed all this, and yet he fretted for decades over one single aspect of China's inventive history that seems at odds with the main story: the curious fact that after centuries of scientific and technological creativity, everything in China suddenly ground to a halt.

The Chinese of the distant past—the ancient Chinese who lived before Europe's Christian era, the old Chinese living when Europe had its Dark Ages, and the medieval Chinese en masse of the twelfth and thirteenth European centuries—did essentially all the inventing. Come the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance was fully under way in Europe, the creative passions of China suddenly seemed to dry up; the energy began to ebb away and die.

Ever since that moment—AD 1500 is regarded as the approximate turning point—nearly all modern scientific advance transferred itself to where it remains today, becoming the nearly exclusive preserve of the West.

This intrigued Needham from the time he first discussed it with Lu
Gwei-djen in Cambridge in the late 1930s. It haunted him so ceaselessly, and it pervaded so much of what he later wrote, that it was to become his memorializing eponym: it became known as the “Needham question.”

Why, Needham asked—if the Chinese had been so technologically creative for so very long, and if they invented so much in antiquity—why did
modern
science develop not in China but in Europe and the West? Why was China unable to hold on to its early advantage and creative edge? Why was there never a true industrial revolution in China? Why was there no firm embrace of capitalism? Why, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was China a nation known principally for being backward, hostile, and poor? How did the brilliant early nation evolve into Emerson's later “booby nation”?

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:

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

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.