Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China
by Simon Winchester
Viking, £20
JOSEPH NEEDHAM’S achievement in his 24 volume Science and Civilisation in China is immense, destroying the myth that China never invented anything. Francis Bacon, the 17th century philosopher, said the three most important world-changing inventions were gunpowder, printing and the compass. The historian Lynn White Jr added the stirrup for warfare and the harness for ploughing. China beat the West to all five. All exhaustingly catalogued, subject by subject, by Needham and his mistress Lu Gwei-djen.
Until the 1950s – and beyond – the West saw China as a benighted country, backward, cruel and rigid, a perception the product of racism and xenophobia compounded by cultural arrogance and ignorance. When Mao took over in 1949 it was made worse by a visceral anti-communism. Needham’s magnum opus challenged the myth by putting China back, front and centre in world history.
Simon Winchester tells a rollicking good story. Lots of sex, derring-do and some violence. Needham virtually lived in a ménage à trois with his wife Dorothy and Gwei-djen. His expeditions across China, as a British diplomat during the war, took him to places few Westerners had been and under the threat of Japanese bombs and bullets. In 1952, his report claiming – probably wrongly – that the US used chemical and biological weapons against China and North Korea during the Korean War caused enormous controversy and led to him being ostracised at Cambridge University.
The problem is that Winchester guts Needham of his left-wing politics, portrayed as a mere eccentricity. True, Needham was no orthodox communist. He was complex and complicated but, for all that, politics were central to his life and work. Gary Werskey, in The Visible College, his collective biography of British socialist scientists of the 1930s, presents a more balanced picture of Needham. Like Haldane, Bernal, Hogben and Levy, he was profoundly influenced by the Second International Congress of History of Science and Technology in London in 1931, when a team of Soviet scientists and historians, led by Bukharin, presented a series of papers, the most crucial of which was Boris Hessen’s on The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia. He believed: “Science develops out of production and those social forms which become fetters upon productive forces likewise become fetters upon science.”
Needham published an historical account of embryology which had great men stacked upon the shoulders of their predecessors. By 1934 he was saying “further historical research will enable us to do for the great embryologists what has been so well done by Hessen for Isaac Newton.”
Lu Gwei-djen’s love and influence transposed Needham from biologist to Sinologist and Science and Civilization in China was written as a political project that, rightly, placed China back where it should have always been. It was the pause from 1500 to 1950 while China lost its way that was unusual, not the success, and Winchester sells Needham and his readers short.
Glyn Ford
