Chinese science once far surpassed that in the West. A 45 ...

by Arthur Fisher

Chinese science once far surpassed that
in the West. A 45-year-old-research effort is turning

up the reasons the roles reversed.

well-educated Chinese visiting England to be scientific counsellor at the British Em- fate," adds Needham. "After that it was
or any place in Western Europe a bassy in Chungking and to run the Sino- impossible to think of doing anything but
thousand years ago might justifia- British Science Cooperation Office. He had a book on the history of science, technol-
learned Chinese from colleagues at Cam- ogy, and medicine in Chinese culture. It was
bly have been disdainful of western tech- bridge. "There were very few British sci- something that had not previously existed
nology. Where, for example, were the me™ entists who knew Chinese," he recalls, "and in western literature."
chanical clocks? They had been telling time a biochemist-embryologist was expendable."
in China since the eighth century C.E. (com- That was the genesis of an international
mon era) but were not to be invented in "Those four years in China sealed my exercise that is still going on, one that has
Europe until the fourteenth. Where were
the wheelbarrows, invented in China in the Astronomical cloeic tower. Constructed i
third century but not to appear in the West Kaifeng in Honan, the hydromechanical clock-
for another thousand years? And where were work dates back about 900 years. (The illustra-
magnetic compasses, gunpowder, and print-
ing techniques—seen ultimately by historians tion and others in this article are reprinted
of the western world as focal to the trans- with permission from Science and Ciwiiization
formation of European society? All had pre-
viously been invented in China. in China, Cambridge University Press.)

Indeed, virtually until the sixteenth and clockwork: John Christiansen.
seventeenth centuries of the common era,
the Chinese were far in advance of their
European contemporaries in knowledge about
nature and the application of that knowl-
edge to human improvement. This is be-
coming increasingly unquestionable, even
unassailable. Yet this fact raises questions,
and modern scholars are only now coming
to terms with them. What enabled the Chinese
to gain so formidable a technological edge
in the first place? And, more puzzling, with
that edge why did they not proceed to what
in the West became the next seemingly in-
evitable step: the leap forward into modern
science that we call Europe's scientific revo-
lution, which finally took place in the six-
teenth century?

These questions are the enduring concern
of an international group of sinologists and
science historians. At its nucleus, as he has
been for 40-odd years, is a reconstructed
Cambridge University biochemist-embry-
ologist named Joseph Needham.

Expendable

Needham, who is credited with putting
the S in UNESCO (he became science director),
had been sent to China during World War II

MOSAIC March/April 1982 i

completely overturned the usual precon- Press beginning in 1954, Science and Civili- tight ship compartments, and a host of me-
ceptions about Chinese thought and civili- zation in China now stands at nine fat b o o k s chanical inventions.
zation and has lifted Joseph Needham and (two more in press) and more than 6,000
his collaborators to a pinnacle of scholarly pages. Scholars from around the world have Nowhere, Needham declares, is the Chinese
achievement. It is a work that one critic contributed, but most of those 6,000 pages record of innovation clearer than in the me-
calls " p e r h a p s the greatest single act of his- were written by Needham himself. "Origi- chanical realm. He cites, for example:
torical synthesis and intercultural commu- nally we t h o u g h t of one slim v o l u m e / '
nication attempted by one man." Published Needham says wryly, forty-five years later, • The seismograph, invented by Chang
a volume at a time by Cambridge University " b u t it just grew like a benign tumor." Heng in about 130 C.E. and used for
centuries thereafter.
fisher is group editor for science and engi- To start, Needham and his colleagues drew
up a master plan "dividing the universe • The simple wheelbarrow, invented in
neering at Popular Science. '• into seven volumes"—a notion that would the third century C.E., but not to appear
have delighted Diderot and the rest of the in Europe until a thousand years later.
eighteenth-century French encyclopedists.
T h a t is still the plan, but when complete • The equatorial mounting and the clock
the project will comprise some twenty books, drive for astronomical observations. A
since some of the volumes must be p u b - famous astronomical clock tower, con-
lished in as many as six parts. The project structed by So Sung at Kaifeng in
is in excellent, seaworthy shape, says Need- 1088 C.E., has armillary spheres and
h a m at age 8 1 , and it will eventually reach celestial globes that were rotated by water
port "whether the original pilots are on the power, using a constant-level tank, a
bridge or not." driving wheel with buckets, and a kind
of escapement or ratchet. It was thus an
East to west early example of what N e e d h a m calls
hydro-mechanical clockwork.
Joseph Needham is a tall, large-framed
man with silver hair and bright blue eyes. • The first great segmental arch bridge,
He mounts the stairs between floors at his built in China by Li Chiin soon after
library with the vigor of a man 30 years his 600 C.E. There were none in Europe
junior. And his voice, as he limns the features until after 1300 C.E., in Italy.
of the vast terrain he set out to explore so
m a n y years ago, is clear and firm. He begins • The first suspension bridge, using iron
by debunking. chains, built in China at least as early
as the sixth century C.E. T h e principle
The record, he says, should credit the was not suggested in Europe until the
Chinese with a plethora of scientific and end of the sixteenth century, and the
technological feats they are not supposed first European bridge of this type was
to have accomplished. " A whole series of not built there until the late 1700s.
bulky volumes" could be written about them,
Needham affirms. • Foot or boot stirrups did not appear in
the West until the eighth c e n t u r y C.E.
These achievements, most of which eventu- but are seen in Chinese tomb figures of
ally reached Western Europe either by sea about 500 years earlier.
or via the great overland silk caravan routes,
include not only the magnetic compass, • Both principal kinds of efficient har-
gunpowder, and printing, but such things ness for draught animals—the collar and
as the observation of sunspot cycles, multi- the postilion. They appeared in China
ple masts and fore-and-aft sails for sailing centuries before they did in the West.
ships, axially mounted rudders and water-
• The essential components of the mod-
Wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow was used u» transport arrny supplies in China by the I jry ern steam engine. These were seen in
C.E. But the use of single-wheeled carriers can be traced oven luritier back to around , as China at least as early as the sixth century
shown in this tomb-shrine relief. C.E., with the combination of c r a n k and
connecting rod for the interconversion
of rotary and longitudinal motion. T h e
double-acting principle, used in the re-
ciprocating steam engine, cannot be
traced in Europe back beyond 1700.
But Chinese double-acting piston box
bellows are described in a book pub-
lished about 1270, and it is probable
that they were in use more than a thou-
sand years earlier.

In some cases, Needham says, there was
no connection between a western invention
and a much earlier similar or identical one
in China. This would be true of Fraun-
hofer's reinvention of the clock drive in
1824. But in general, he adds, "technical
inventions...show a slow but massive infil-
tration from east to west throughout the

10 MOSAIC March/April 1982

first 14 centuries of the Christian era." m i l i t a r y - a r i s t o c r a t i c , In fact It was more being an overriding factor. Chinese civiliza-
T h e actual diffusion of some of these ad- logical, rational, and much more powerful tion began along the Yellow River Valley,
And while it seems to have favored natural and that mighty waterway tends to silt up
vances from east to west has been well docu- knowledge in the beginning, it later on com- and overflow, with floods a constant danger.
mented. Take paper and printing, for exam- pletely stopped the appearance of modern Direct government support from very early
ple. Pieces of paper h a v e been found in science In C h i n a . " times was directed toward river control and
tombs in the Gobi Desert dating back to 300 Irrigation, the making of dikes and canals.
B.C.E., and N e e d h a m says there is "a verita- Very early in China's history, Needham To paraphrase Needham, the need for hy-
ble timetable" for the route they traveled. explains, the idea that everything in the draulic works favored the unification of the
"You can pinpoint the papermaking—it's in feudal state should be run by a professional empire, achieved in 221 B.C.E. And this power-
Baghdad by about 750 or so, and then it bureaucrat took hold. For 2,000 years, the ful geographic influence, he says, "equally
comes to Iran and to Egypt and North Africa, military was kept under firm control. "It's remains one of the best explanations of w h y
and then to Spain. The dates go continu- an amazing thing," he says, "but civilian China was traditionally bureaucratic, not
ously all along." values were absolutely dominant in China." aristocratic. Water control and management
Every city In China was a node In the ad- always tended to transcend the boundaries
Often, however, only subtle clues point ministrative network held for the emperor of feudal domains, since only an emperor and
to evidence for linkage. The magnetic com- by the civilian governor, Needham explains. his hierarchy of officials were competent to
pass is one example. Its origins probably There were also military assistant-governors, master It."
lie with first-century Chinese priests who but their place in the bureaucracy "was about
used magnetized lodestone for divining ten ranks down." This feudal, bureaucratic state was Ideally
boards. "It was clearly known in China and suited to the pursuit of knowledge, especially
used for navigation," adds Needham, "two This centralized political system, Needham knowledge that could help Improve the
or three centuries before the Europeans got believes, stemmed much less from political h u m a n condition. All sorts of laboratories
hold of it." T h e European compass could ideology than from circumstances, geography
have had Chinese origin, he says, even though
Chinese compass needles always pointed
south. Although European navigational
compass needles pointed north, he notes,
there is some evidence that in Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mining
and surveying compasses pointed south.
That suggests to Needham that "the com-
pass might have traveled to Europe not by
sea, around India, but right across the main-
land, on the Old Silk Road."

Why not China?

Similar examples of a centuries-long dom-
inance by the Chinese In a diversity of other
technologies and sciences—astronomy, chem-
istry, metallurgy, pyrotechnics—have been
developed in massive detail by Joseph Need-
ham and his coworkers, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang
Ling, and Ho Ping-Yii. But to return to the
two questions that launched such herculean
labors, why was this so? And being so, why
did China fail to experience the kind of sci-
entific revolution that changed the face of
western civilization forever?

The answers seem to lie in Chinese cul-
ture and society, Needham and his cohorts
are finding—principally in the failure of a
merchant class to appear in China. Mer-
cantilism In China, Needham notes, was
stifled by the very system—centralized,
agrarian, bureaucratic—that had initially
nurtured the rise of science and technology.

To understand this apparent contradiction,
says Needham, "one has to realize that the
nature of feudalism In China was funda-
mentally different from that in the West.
Instead of being military-aristocratic and
territorial, It was bureaucratic. And although
at first glance the bureaucratic type of feud-
alism looks to be much weaker than the

MOSAIC March/April 1982 11

were supported by the state at various times. cieiSiiic«yi'dpri. hrv.Mnfcwuction of n w i t h o u t an e n o r m o u s amount of experi-
By the 6 t h c e n t u r y C.E., there was already mentation and record keeping about how to
an alchemical laboratory kept up by a national l o l l >nio I I , u r n - t j i h r>| ;J ],>~H-t arrange the kiln, how to produce oxidizing
academy and by public funds. In fact, says or reducing atmospheres (as we would call
Needham, in the Han dynasty, as early as 60 thing outside nature; the Tao was the order them), what glaze to use, and so on. The
B.C.E., there had been concerted efforts to of nature, the way nature w o r k s . " same is true of silk weaving and pattern
produce immortality drugs in the imperial weaving. I think in a way the magnetic com-
workshops. In the Tao (literally, the way) "there wasn't pass is also a case in point, because the
anything at all inimical to science," says earliest one was a lodestone spoon. And
Support also went to road builders and Needham. "In fact the Taoists were always that was derived from a kind of proto-chess,
bridge designers, with their concern for com- around when scientific discoveries or tech- where you threw pieces representing the
munications, transport, and the like. And nological innovations were made in ancient planets and other things onto a board and
the Chinese state maintained through the China." As for Buddhism, the most unworldly saw where they fell—divination by throw-
ages a national astronomical observatory at of the Chinese religions, "[it] couldn't really ing. So experimentation wasn't a missing
Yang-ch'eng in Honan. Like its later western have set itself against science at all, because element."
c o u n t e r p a r t s , it reported on the state of the in a way it wasn't interested." Indeed, he adds,
heavens, on which so much was thought to "some of the greatest scientists in China in What was missing, in Needham's view,
depend. the Middle Ages were Buddhists—I-Hsing, was the mathematization of hypotheses
for example, the greatest mathematician and about nature and the theoretical constructs
Structure, not credo astronomer of his age." it made possible. Mathematization, com-
bined with unremitting experimentation,
Why, then, with science and technology Weakness in mathematics? Not a factor. was the keystone of the scientific revolution
flourishing in this relatively benign, power- The Chinese had invented decimal place- in the West. It is what might be called the
ful, centralized system, did a scientific revo- value, with a blank space for zero, long Galilean method. Despite the presence of
lution not take place, either then or later? Or before anyone else—sometime in the fourth mathematics, "discovery of the best method
to put it in Needham's own words: " W h y century B.C.E. " I n the thirteenth c e n t u r y , " of discovery" just did not take place in
did modern science, the mathematizationof says Needham, "they were far more ad- China, says Needham.
hypotheses about nature, with all its impli- vanced than Europe in the solution of nu-
cations for advanced technology, take its merical equations. They never got to calculus, A package deal
meteoric rise only in the West, at the time but I think their mathematics was quite
of Galileo?" good enough to have allowed a scientific Galileo, born in the year of Shakespeare's
revolution." birth and Michelangelo's death (1564), per-
It is perhaps worthwhile first to.dismiss sonifies the intellectual leap we call the sci-
the elements, some superficially credible, Nor were they restrained by any philo- entific revolution. And mathematization
that appear decidedly not to have been sophical credo from performing experiments, was perhaps his greatest contribution.
responsible for the failure of such develop- an essential ingredient of scientific progress.
ment in China. Religion, for example was Needham points to "that great triumph of "Philosophy is written in that great book
not a factor. Religion in China, Needham the ceramics industry in China," the inven- which ever lies before our gaze—I mean the
points out, was actually much less important tion of porcelain. "All those glazes they made, universe—but we cannot understand it if we
than it had been in India. Needham de- and the infinite n u m b e r of their artistic do not learn the language and grasp the
scribes Confucianism, the ascendant creed, achievements, couldn't have been done symbols in which it is written." In this famous
as "very this-worldly." And Taoism, its passage from the Assay erf Galileo continues:
principal competitor, "didn't recognize any- " T h e book is written in the mathematical

12 y O S A I C yarch/April 1982

language...without the help of which it is But what was it that happened in Renais- because it needed the substitution of a world
impossible to conceive a single word of it, sance Europe that never happened in China? of quantity for a world of quality. Mercan-
and without which one wanders in vain Why did Europe mathematicize the uni- tilists absolutely had to quantify, says
through a dark labyrinth." It was the essence verse and the Chinese not? Needham. "If you bought a hundred barrels
of the Galilean method to construct precise of some particular kind of oil in some island
theories about natural phenomena —the "It's very clear that in Europe there was a of the Aegean, then you absolutely had to
motion of bodies, for example—and then sort of package deal," N e e d h a m explains. k n o w its properties, the weight of it, the
interrogate them, as it were, with conscious, "The scientific revolution took place along spreading power, what it would dissolve."
experimental tests. with the rise of capitalism and the Reforma-
tion. They may be somewhat difficult to Of course, the Chinese also had merchants.
"Two thousand years before," science disentangle, but none of them took place in "But they were not in close relation to the
historian Alexandre Koyre has written, China at all." And capitalism, the rise of a state power," says Needham. "They were
"Pythagoras had claimed that number is the mercantile class, seems to be at the crux of always tremendously kept down in China.
actual essence of things, and the Bible later the matter. This was also the view of a They could acquire great wealth, but they
taught that God had based the world upon leading philosopher of capitalism, the late couldn't become gentlemen. For that you
number, weight, and measure. Everybody Joseph A. Schumpeter, who held that the had to know the classics and get into the
repeated this, but nobody believed it. At emergence of business calculation in the late civil service. The disparity led to a general
least, up to Galileo nobody took it seriously." Middle Ages led to the development of sci- despising of all things that interested mer-
entific rationality. "In this respect," he wrote, chants, and therefore of quantitative sci-
Certainly not the theory-poor Chinese. "it is highly significant that modern mathe- ence. It isn't really easy to unravel the exact
Needham characterizes Chinese science and matical experimental science developed, in relationship.
technology as " V i n c e a n " because of the the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, not only
very theoretical backwardness of that aston- along with the social process called the rise "But in Europe, where buying and selling
ishing figure Leonardo da Vinci. For exam- of capitalism, but also outside the fortress of were extremely important, and the people
ple, da Vinci believed, without ever testing scholastic . t h o u g h t and in the face of its who bought and sold were in influential
the notion, that the moisture of a wet rag contemptuous hostility." places in the state, you got a great interest in
had an intrinsic tendency to move toward methods of measurements of all sorts. And
fire. "It helps us to understand," according Dead end that links up with mathematization, or asking
to Needham, "what remarkable technical exact questions of n a t u r e . "
achievements may be effected without ade- But how would the needs of a merchant
quate scientific theory." class impel a Galilean approach? Primarily To amplify his point, Needham compares
technical developments that should have
paralleled each other in China and the West.
The Chinese should have been interested in
mechanics for ships, hydrostatics for their
enormous n e t w o r k of canals, and ballistics
for guns (having possessed gunpowder four
or five centuries before Europeans). "If they
were not," Needham asks, "couldn't the
answer be sought in the fact that little or
no private profit was to be raised from any
of these things in Chinese society, dominated
by its imperial bureaucracy?"

In the absence of the mercantilist need to
quantify everything from astronomy to horse-

MOSAIC March/April 1982 13

power, and in the absence of mercantile
ascendance, Chinese science hit a dead end,
Needham summarizes: "Interest in nature
was not enough. Controlled experimenta-
tion was not enough. Empirical induction
was not enough. Eclipse prediction and cal-
endar calculation were not enough. All these
the Chinese had. Apparently a mercantile
culture alone was able to do what agrarian
bureaucratic civilization could not: bring to
fusion point the formerly separated disci-
plines of mathematics and nature knowledge."

Disparate mews
Not all scholars—not even all of Needham's

present collaborators—embrace this view-
point wholeheartedly. An example is Nathan
Sivin of the University of Pennsylvania, a
specialist in several areas of early Chinese
science, who contributed much to the general
theory of elixir alchemy. (The search for an
elixir of life, described in the thirteenth cen-
tury by Roger Bacon, was a notion that
Europeans acquired from China.)

Of differences between his and Needham's
perspectives, Sivin says, "The main differ-
ence is that Needham is concerned with
finding out what particular discoveries,
looked at in isolation, deserve credit from
the standpoint of modern science." But since
Sivin started much later, when the issue of
credit had already been resolved, he has
been concentrating on how the Chinese them-
selves reasoned and how they worked out
their procedures. As Sivin puts it in his
contribution to the latest of the Science and

14 yOSAIC March/April 1982

The project Professor of History at the Univer- Civilization in China volumes: "I was in-
sity of California at Davis, on mili- terested in something he really wasn't, to
Alfred North Whitehead once observed, tary technology, the salt industry, seek out what the Chinese alchemists them-
in Science and the Modern World, that and deep borehole drilling. selves thought they were doing. So there is a
"Chinese civilization is the most vol- • Joseph McDermott of Harvard Uni- kind of complementarity in our interests."
uminous in the world." To deal with that versity, on demography.
incredibly diverse civilization, Joseph • N a t h a n Sivin, Professor of Chinese Sivin believes that it is distracting at the
Needham has assembled a host of con- at the University of Pennsylvania, least, and probably futile, to expect any an-
tributors and collaborators from the United on theories of Chinese alchemy. swer to the questions about the missing sci-
States, England, China, Japan, Sweden, • Robin Yates of the Chinese Library entific revolution in ancient China "until
Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, France, at the University of Chicago, on the Chinese tradition has been comprehended
i Germany, and elsewhere. Most are spe- military technology. from the inside." He holds, despite Need-
I cialists in a single area of Chinese science The headquarters for this international ham's doubts, that an internalist or ideological
or culture as well as general sinologists. effort is the East Asian History of Sci- explanation will have to be found before
All are continuing their own scholarly ence Library, a modest, three-story house Needham's monum.en.tal effort will really ex-
work while they participate in Needham's near the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge, plain the failure of modern natural science
joint venture: the multivolume Science England. It houses, besides books, a unique to arise in China.
and Civilization in China. Contributors collection: the thousands of pieces of
from the United States include: research material, in a profusion of lan- This is too idealistic for Needham.. " O n e
guages, that are essential to the project, must always expect," he says, "that some
• Derk Bodde, Emeritus Professor of Here Joseph Needham works and writes of these intellectual limiting factors will be
Chinese at the University of Pennsyl- ten hours a day, together with a rotating definable. But for my part I remain skeptical
vania, writing on the world outlook complement of collaborators and assistants that there are many factors of this kind which
of the traditional Chinese scholars. that includes Lu Gwei-Djen, his chief could not have been overcome if the social
collaborator. Support for the project comes and economic conditions had been favora-
• Ch'ien Ts'un-Hsuin, Emeritus Pro- from many sources (United States and ble for the development of modern science
fessor and Regenstein Librarian of British aid is from the National Science in China."
the University of Chicago, on paper Foundation and the Cambridge University
and printing. Press respectively); it is channeled through In the long run, it may be that the most
the East Asian History of Science Trust valuable part of the immense contribution
• Peter Golas, Professor of Chinese in Cambridge, Chicago's East Asian His- made by Needham and his associates has
at the University of Denver, on tory of Science, Inc., and a parallel orga- been to establish for China (and by inference
mining. nization in Hong Kong. • (or all cultures) the grand ecumenical, nature
of science and technology. " M y collabora-
• Huang Jen-Yii, Professor of East tois and 1," says the Cambridge scholar,
Asian History at the State Univer- "have long been accustomed to the image
sity of New York at New Paltz, on of the ancient and medieval sciences of all
fiscal, economic, and social history. peoples and cultures as rivers flowing into
the ocean of modern science...But there is
• The late Lo Jung-Pang, Emeritus loom for a great deal of difference of opinion
On h o w the process has h a p p e n e d , and h o w
it will proceed....It will be a long haul before
we can answer the questions of the Sphinx
about the development of the natural sci-
ences...and it will take the combined efforts
of all of us to do it."

It also seems likely to Needham that some
future toiler on that long haul will wander
down an obscure byway already explored
somewhere in the millions of words of Science
and Civilization in China, N e e d h a m recalls
one such encounter of his own: "It reminded
me of the triumphal wooden gateway built
by Wang, the Taoist priest. He put it over
the path through the barren mountains from
the Thousand-Buddha Caves to the temple
of the Goddess of Mercy b y some ever-
running springs. In that desolate, little-visited
place in Kansu there is the inscription 'Ni lax
Mao ma: What, have you come here t o o ? ' " •

The National Science Foundation supports
its part of the research discussed in this
article principally through its ^History and
Philosophy of Science Program in the Divi-
sion of Social and Economic Science,

MOSAIC March/April 1982 15