Four thousand years ago, when we couldn’t even read, the Chinese knew all the absolutely useful things we boast about today.
—VOLTAIRE: THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY, 1764
Much has changed in China since Joseph Needham’s battered old transport plane first touched down there in the spring of 1943. The city where he was based, Chongqing—or Chungking, as it was written then, when it was the capital of Free China—is now like few places on earth, growing so fast and so furiously that it is hard to keep up with the speed of the changes. Chongqing is now by far the most populous city in China, and by some counts can be regarded as the biggest city in the world. Thirty-eight million people live crammed within its metropolitan limits. The frantic rhythms of their lives capture the concentrated essence of everything, good and ill, about the awe-inspiring, terrifying entity that is today’s new China.
The Yangzi still sweeps through the city, as ever, a turbulent winding sheet of thick brown sludge busy with countless hundreds of ships, sampans, junks, barges, and any number of other kinds of lumbering or scurrying watercraft. But the Yangzi is perhaps the only thing that someone returning after many years would recognize today. Now eight new bridges swoop over the river, and eight sparkling new monorail lines on stilts run along beside it. Clusters of skycrapers have sprung up in each of the half dozen commercial centers, all of them glittering by day, and at night becoming a pulsing, flashing, Technicolor light show, a gaudy urban entertainment, with neon stripes of vivid yellow and royal blue racing up and down the sides of the taller buildings, the highway crash barriers winking pink, purple, and green, the tops of buildings flashing stars and with sinuous curves of colored light crowning replicas of some of the world’s best-known buildings: the Empire State, the Chrysler, the Grande Arche of La Défense.
Perhaps the Needhams and Gwei-djen would still just recognize the Liberation Monument, a pillar and a clock (that used to chime “The East Is Red” but now merely booms in the style of Big Ben), which was there when they were, dedicated in the 1930s initially to the memory of Sun Yat-sen; today it memorializes the defeat of the Japanese invaders in 1945. They might just remember the structure—but not its surroundings. There are hundreds of restaurants, selling popcorn and ice cream and various unidentifiable meats; there are cell-phone shops, gleaming department stores, and lines of young men and women holding placards advertising skills—translating, painting, cleaning earwax, walking dogs, bricklaying, personal training—that they will perform for extra cash. There are teeming masses of people, happy-looking, prosperous, loud, boisterous, well-dressed, well-coiffed, and well-fed, and all Chinese, flooding the square as though every day were a holiday and every moment fashioned for them alone, just to be enjoyed. Young policewomen weave their way through the crowds on roller skates, keeping a wary eye: and in the alleys there are riot police with dogs, just in case. All seems happy. All are watched.
Current figures attesting to Chongqing’s size, growth, and standing are little short of stupendous. They are of a scale and sweep that Needham, working diligently among the ruins and devastation of sixty years ago, could never have imagined. Sixty years in the life of a city that, like Chongqing, is 1,500 years old might seem like nothing—London has changed dramatically in its past six decades, as have Paris, Cairo, Moscow, and Rome: yet in their essence these western cities are still today much the same as they always were, recognizable physically, familiar in the way they feel, sound, and smell. But this is manifestly not so for Chongqing: the same interval has brought about for this city changes few other urban centers in the world have ever experienced, creating a future world, part Blade Runner, part Shinjuku, part Dickensian London, that is profoundly unrecognizable, a place to take away one’s breath.
The entire municipal entity that is known as Chongqing incorporates both the crowded inner city and an officially city-governed semirural hinterland, the two together occupying about the same area as Maine, a little bit less than Austria, slightly more than Tasmania. The population of 38 million puts it in a league not so much with other cities as with entire respectably sized countries—it is more populous than Iraq, for instance, bigger than Malaysia, bigger than Peru.
The arithmetic is relentless. Every day 800 babies are born in Chongqing and 500 people die—many of them from emphysema, since the air quality is so bad, or by their own hand, so firmly have the new urban phenomena of angst and anomie taken hold. Thirteen hundred of the rural poor stream into the city each day to try to grab for themselves some of the riches that are so clearly being generated within. Thus some 1,600 new people every day are added to the population—the equivalent of all the people of Luxembourg welding themselves onto the city every year.
To accommodate these numbers new skyscrapers are being flung up with furious abandon. Developers rule. The old houses, the charming little slum lanes known as hutongs, Buddhist and Confucian temples, Soviet-style factories, schools built in the 1950s—all of them fall these days to the wreckers’ ball and the bulldozers, and out of their ruins rise gleaming shopping arcades, office towers, and forests of apartment buildings, a ceaseless building frenzy.
There was a brief pause in the spring of 2007, when an engagingly defiant couple in Chongqing caused a fuss by refusing to move from their well-worn row house, the compensation offered being too miserly, they said. Their property then remained untouched for weeks, a solitary island of brick on its tower of foundation earth standing alone in the center of a vast pit of mud, with the developers of the new project—an office building—waiting on the sidelines like vultures until the courts voted to tell the old owners to go. Inevitably, the courts did that—although the fate of what came to be known as the little “nail house”—since it looked like an unhammered nail, sticking up inconveniently and preventing all forward movement around it—became a worldwide sensation. It was pictured on the front page of the New York Times no less, and people said sagely that it demonstrated the battle for the rights of the Chinese individual over the rights of commerce, greed, and progress.
In the end, however symbolic the battle, the individuals lost and the developers won, and the march of Chinese progress resumed. Chongqing became a little bit more modern and its skyline a little bit more impressive; the nail house was forgotten; and the old couple, now seen as more querulous than engaging, took their money and moved to a new development somewhere out of town. An immense tower now stands where their cottage once squatted.
Chongqing is also a place of the most crushing poverty, a melancholy state of affairs made even more so when viewed against the knowledge that the city’s economy grows by $14 million each day, and that there will be 150,000 square feet of new office floor space completed each evening. It is all the more painful when it is seen—a crippled beggar here, a sickly ragamuffin there, a hollow-faced and hungry street musician waiting for coins—against a backdrop of lines of gleaming BMWs waiting in traffic jams, scores of construction cranes whirling against the skyline, elegant Thai restaurants jammed at lunchtime with young models wearing the gipao, nightclubs that breezily demand an entrance fee of $100 and are packed and heaving with local people until the small hours.
The dark side of Chongqing is very significant, too, if largely unseen. On the street corners, and noticeable everywhere if one chooses to look, are members of the ragged army of unemployed ban-ban men, freelance porters with thick bamboo shoulder poles at the ready, game for any job carrying anything, from a giant wardrobe to a sparrow in a birdcage. There are said to be 100,000 of these men, who will be lucky to earn a dollar a day—and the work ensures that they will die long before they are fifty. There are beggars, Dumpster divers, sickly-looking prostitutes, buskers, and an alarming number of children selling flowers—six-year-olds working late at night while their mothers complete their shifts as waitresses in the local hot-pot restaurants, or as bar girls in the dubious hostelries clustered down by the docks.
And of course there is the ever-present pollution, so dreadful as to be barely credible. There are days when one wakes and cannot see a single building through the thick brownish yellow fog, and the sun even at its midday brightest is often just a vague coppery glare. Chongqing is one of the very few Chinese cities that have long been entirely devoid of bicycles—the steep mountainsides see to that—and so its streets are jam-packed with cars and annoying motorbikes that sound like insects, all of them belching gases into the foul air and making matters decidedly worse. The city produces 3,500 tons of rubbish every day, none of it recycled, all carted away to be buried in enormous holes dug on the outskirts, where garbage, landfill, and plastic sheeting are sandwiched together in a repeating pattern like lasagna until the void is full, the area is covered and seeded, and a golf course is built on top.
Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen came back to Chongqing in 1982, and they spent an afternoon doddering about, looking in vain for the little house where he had lived forty years before. Even in the 1980s the city was in the throes of monumental change, and the lane where his embassy cottage was seemed to be no longer there; nor was it or the cottage to be found on any maps. The elderly pair left the place after an hour or so, muttering to themselves about the progress that had engulfed the old city.
They were more rueful than critical, though: Needham had always thought that China would turn out like this, sooner or later. It was simply a matter of time—and the Chongqing they saw in 1982 was for them a hint of the future he had predicted, rather than a keepsake of the past he mourned. Only its great river, rolling past so solemnly, with the steam tugs yelping and the long sea freighters moaning their way past the docks, presented them with a scene that was comfortingly unchanged.
Still, much else about China, even today, resists alteration. The rivers and the landscape will always be there, of course, to provide a backdrop, a climate, and indelible tracts of geology and topography. Some man-made creations have remained much the same over the years as well, no matter what prosperity may have done to China superficially.
The written language, for example—the very thing that so fascinated Needham when he first met Lu Gwei-djen in 1937—remains intact, essentially unaltered from its origins more than 3,000 years ago. The cuisine is much the same—wheat noodles in the north, rice in the south, and chopsticks used throughout the country as they have been for thirty decades. The music, unique in register, timbre, tone, and rhythm, may bend with the styles of the day, but a song from the Tang would be perfectly recognizable today, and even the most modern of Beijing operas is deeply influenced by the archaic and the traditional.
The physical appearance of the Han Chinese people survives, too. Maybe the Chinese are not so racially homogeneous as the Japanese or the Koreans. But as a continental people they remain distinct from many others—Americans, Russians, Europeans—in obviously belonging to one race, which is largely disinclined to dilution or change, and whose people much prefer (as the Tibetans can all too readily attest) periods of long-term ethnic stability and a cautious but relentless expansion.
Within this framework of changelessness there is also, entirely discernible, something else that resists change—something that can only be described as an attitude. It is a Chinese state of mind, and one which outsiders—and all who are non-Chinese are very much outsiders here—may occasionally find infuriating and insufferable, but which certainly exists, and at no great depth beneath the Chinese skin. It is an attitude, one might argue, that has been born of the very achievement which Joseph Needham attempted to catalog and describe in his series of books. It is an attitude of ineluctable and self-knowing Chinese superiority, and it results from the antiquity and the longevity of the Chinese people’s endeavors.
A list of Chinese endeavors—one version is to be found in Appendix I—illustrates how in almost every aspect of their lives, the people of old China seem to have been imbued with a deep desire for cultural improvement—for making life easier, better, and more truly civilized than it is anywhere else in the world. In that one sense the cumulative consequence of Needham’s list is incontrovertible: by inventing a stirrup, a compass, a sheet of printing paper, a wheelbarrow, or a suspension bridge, the Chinese were always bent on making life steadily more comfortable for themselves.
Yet at the same time there was invariably a downside to this unending achievement—at least, so far as outsiders were concerned. The very fact that the Chinese achieved so much and so quickly (fifteen major inventions a century, Needham once calculated) appears to have created a sense of self-satisfaction and superiority—a kind of national smugness that led Emperor Qianlong to remark so famously to Lord Macartney, “We possess all things…. I have no use for your country’s manufactures.” And this self-congratulatory complacency, this hubris, inevitably contributed to the problems which caused the empire in time to flounder and fall, and which led to the poverty and backwardness that characterized China for so long.
But China is neither poor nor backward anymore; and it is one of the ironies of history that the success of modern China derives in large measure from this very same sense—which aggrieved westerners like Lord Macartney might say was a peculiarly and infuriatingly Chinesesense—of self-certainty, of an unshakable confidence about its position at the center of the world. And all this certainty derives from the sturdy foundation of civilization that China built for itself so very long ago. Needham cataloged in the finest detail the robust antiquity of that civilization, illustrating the reason for all the self-confidence and self-assurance—the unique degree of self-knowledge that helps to make China China.
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:
It is the State that kills technological progress in China—not only in the sense that it nips in the bud anything that goes against or seems to go against its interests, but also by the customs implanted inexorably by the raison d’État. The atmosphere of routine, of traditionalism, and of immobility, which makes any innovation, or any initiative that is not commanded and sanctioned in advance, suspect, is unfavour-able to the spirit of free inquiry.
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
another reason why many Europeans consider the Chinese such barbarians is on account of the support they give to their Astronomers—people regarded by our civilized Western mortals as completely useless. Yet there they rank with heads of Departments and Secretaries of State. What frightful barbarism!
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.