Putting Joseph Needham in the East Asian Context: Commentaries on Papers about the Reception of Needham's Works in Korea and Taiwan

Joseph Needham was the champion of the history of science in China. His Science and Civilization in China series (hereafter, SCC), first published in 1954, was soon recognized as the gold standard in the field.

Many have already examined Needham's works and SCC in various ways (see, e.g., Low 1998). Yet, we need to review its contemporary meaning and examine how his work received recognition in different contexts. One thing we need to consider is the cultural diversity within which Chinese science has been practiced. Geographically, the focuses of the history of sciences are shifting from China itself to the wider region of East Asia, and to more diverse cultural contexts regardless of location. Students of Needham's work are shifting their focus from China to the diverse populations where he worked and where his work has been received. We are paying more attention to those extensions where different knowledge has interacted in different cultures and institutional settings in East Asia.

In recent studies of the history of science in East Asia, interest in and originating from Needham's work in China has been growing outward to more diverse areas where his works and ideas have been discussed and contested. Chinese civilization has always been evolving; it is neither a stereotype nor a cultural monolith, as some scholars have often presumed; its borders have always moved and changed, and so the Chinese have continuously been redefining themselves against the different kinds of socio-cultural settings and physical-materialistic boundaries they have confronted. We should not take modern nation states for granted—East Asia is polycentric, as indicated by the general theme of the 15th International Congress of History of Science in East Asia, held in Jeonju, Republic of Korea, in August 2019. It is important to acknowledge the cultural diversity categorized under "Chinese civilization"—there are not just Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and those others who came under the Chinese umbrella, but one may count more nations, countries, and communities within and around the interpretive scheme of "cultural China" or "Chinese Asia."¹

This issue of EASTS features two excellent research notes on these issues, one by Jongtae Lim and the other by Pingyi Chu, two authorities on the history of science in East Asia who analyze how Needham has been regarded and how the SCC has been accepted in the Korean and Taiwanese academic contexts, respectively.

The authors of this article had the privilege in 2015 to listen to Lim and Chu's presentations, which became early versions of their research notes. Still, in the EASTS spirit of encouraging constructive conversations among Asian societies, we felt obliged to provide our responses from different intellectual backgrounds. In what follows, two contexts are set: first, Tsukahara comments on the Korean reception of Needham by comparing the Japanese experience, then Mei compares the Taiwanese translation of SCC with the translation endeavor in mainland China.

1 Needham in Korea, the Science and Civilisation in Korea Series, and a Comparison with Japan

Let me begin by summarizing the points of Jongtae Lim's article on Joseph Needham in Korea in this issue. Koreans have not been as enthusiastic about Needham as their Japanese or Taiwanese colleagues have. In the eyes of Korean historians, "Needham had reduced Korean science to an offshoot of the Chinese scientific tradition" (Lim, this issue). Hence, the translation of SCC into Korean started much later than it did in Taiwan and Japan, and the task was not carried out by professional historians or historians of science. Yung Sik Kim has examined the reception of Needham's ideas, which he calls the "problem of China" in Korean history (Kim 1998). While Kim commented on this phenomenon by criticizing its historiographic implications, another renowned historian of science, Seong Rae Park, criticized Needham by pointing out the factual errors Needham made and the biblical/positivistic perspective he took, calling them "superficial and shallow" (Park 1995). Park further pointed out that Korea should have claimed priority over China for several scientific...