Joseph Needham's Problematic Legacy

This is the concluding chapter of an epic that began almost seventy years ago. In 1937, when Japan invaded north China, beginning the full-blown Pacific War, three Chinese students came to Cambridge to study with a world-famous biochemist, Joseph Needham. Greatly impressed by their intelligence, Needham wondered what kind of science ancient China had produced. Thus began an intellectual journey that revealed a vast treasure of scholarly work by Chinese investigators of nature. With his collaborators—one of whom, Lu Gwei-Djen, he later married—Needham planned to demonstrate the wealth of Chinese writing on all the basic modern science and engineering disciplines. Volume 1 of Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) appeared in 1954; by 1995, when he died, Needham had written ten volumes, and other contributors will continue to add more, for a total of twenty-nine.

The astonishing breadth of Needham's learning and his dedication to a few clear guiding principles gave the entire project both impressive analytical power and immense empirical detail. In The Guardian, Laurence Picken called it "perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man." Unlike so many one-man world-historical visionaries (Arnold Toynbee, for example), Needham always went back to the primary sources. He decoded extremely difficult technical texts, providing valuable translations and commentaries of every major work in Chinese science. He proved conclusively that Chinese scholars from earliest times had led the world in inventive genius and analytical creativity in the investigation of nature. (One could go through the science and engineering disciplines at MIT today, for example, in numerical order by course, and find Chinese precursors for all of them—1: Civil Engineering, 2: Mechanical Engineering, 3: Materials Science, 4: Architecture, 5: Chemistry, and so on.) The intellectual gold unearthed by Needham and his assistants still shines.

Yet a single question haunted Needham: Why, if China had shown such incredible dynamism up to 1600 CE, did modern science not arise in China? By "modern science" he meant "the mathematisation of hypotheses about Nature on the one hand, and on the other continuous and relentless experimentation" (pp. 202–3). In Science and Civilisation in China, volume 7, Science and Chinese Society, part 2, General Conclusions and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, li+283, $100), he intended to provide the answer.

But he never found it, and nor has anyone else; the "Needham question" remains unresolved. This volume does not deliver any final summation; instead, it is rather a hodgepodge of fragmentary speculations with some brilliant new specific studies, some by Needham himself, some by others. It contains two lectures he gave in the 1960s; a famous paper on "The Nature of Chinese Society: A Technical Interpretation," mainly written by Ray Huang in 1974; a fascinating section on "Literary Chinese as a Language for Science," co-written with Kenneth G. Robinson in the 1980s; and all-too-brief concluding comments by Needham in the last years of his life.

Needham's huge life-project intimidates everyone. Yet we should not adopt toward Needham's work the attitude of Confucius toward spirits, who respected them but kept them at a distance. Needham strongly impressed everyone who knew him. (I met him once, during a short but memorable visit he paid to MIT in the 1980s.) The best tributes to the lasting value of Needham's inspiration are the new research projects and analyses that go beyond, or even against, some of his most fundamental ideas. To truly honor Needham's work, we should engage critically with him, warts and all. Only in this way will future work on Chinese science progress as he would have wished. Here I honor Needham's insights into Chinese science and technology, but I criticize his social analysis. I hope his shade will not be offended.

As editor, Robinson tried to follow Needham's wishes for volume 7 as closely as possible, but he might have done better to ignore them. The two lectures of the 1960s read like words from a vanished age, the...