Southern University College Academic Journal, Volume 2, August 2014, 1-19
《南方大学学报》第 2 卷， 2014 年 8 月，页 1-19
Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
Wang Gungwu ∗
Can we speak of a science civilization in China? No one doubts today
that China has produced some of the world’s most talented scientists. China’s
technological feats have been impressive and could not have been done
without mastering the heights of advanced science. It is even possible to argue
that there is now a single global civilization established by the universality of
science.
At the same time, the world faces the prospect of having several
contending civilizations, each armed with the fruits of science that could
extend the power and wealth of each of them. Two decades ago, Samuel
Huntington predicted the clash of civilizations. He was not a natural scientist
and his thesis is not generally accepted. Most people reject his idea that
Islamic and Confucian civilizations might become allied some day to become
the greatest threat to Western civilization. Nevertheless, he and many others
use civilizations in the plural, something that goes against the belief that,
while there are many cultures, a universal civilization will be built on the
structures of shared scientific thought.
Not everyone agrees. About a century ago, Oswald Spengler
(1880-1936) used a biological analogy to track the birth, growth, decline and
death of Western civilization. Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) followed him by
identifying dozens of civilizations that had withered away. He warned, in
largely Social Darwinian terms, that modern civilizations could also share the
same fate if they failed to respond to new challenges.
∗
Wang Gungwu is chairman of the East Asian Institute and University Professor, National
University of Singapore. Email: [email protected]
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Wang Gungwu
Most scientists are wary of this line of thinking. For more than half a
century after Spengler and Toynbee, they remain inclined to the view that,
although different regions might have different historic cultures of great
significance, there can only be one single civilization. Indeed, for most of the
20th century, two super-protagonists fought with their superior science and
technology to dominate the world. The United States represented the forces of
capitalist progress while the Soviet Union stood for Marx’s scientific
socialism. It became a global struggle to determine which science civilization
would emerge as the victor. The assumption was that such a civilization
would win the final victory.
The forces of capitalist progress have won that struggle and now face
other threats to its efficacy. But faith in science continues. Insofar as Marxist
analyses of society have been challenged as being wrong and its predictive
power has been found to be inadequate, Marxist claims to be scientific are
now questioned. The conclusion for now is that scientific capitalism and the
liberal democracy that goes with it may be leading the world to a single
scientific civilization.
For China, there are still questions about the nature of this civilization.
To understand why, the contributions of the great historian of science, Joseph
Needham (Li Yuese 李约瑟, 1900-1995), offer some answers. When he died,
many scholars paid tribute to his remarkable work on the history of science, in
particular, the first 17 volumes of the Science and Civilization in China (SCC)
that he authored and supervised. Since then, seven more have been published
and the work continues.
Needham first made his name through his researches in biochemistry
and its history. But his work on China has eclipsed that. His admirers today
focus on his herculean efforts to throw light on questions of early science in
China and of the nature of what he has occasionally called “Chinese science”.
His work on China helped to stimulate extensive debate about the history of
science outside Western Europe. Not only did historians of science compare
science in China, Middle East and India with the modern achievements of the
West, they also compared each of them with one another. More scholars have
taken up the subject seriously, if only to try and prove that the various claims
of ancient civilizations to have had science in some forms or other are either
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Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
wrong or misguided. With every new research project, there have been
successes in finding diffusion links that have been forgotten and cultural
artifacts that were unappreciated before (see, for example, Arun Bala 2010
and 2013).
Clearly, Needham’s efforts to recover the full story of science and
technology in China, from its ancient origins to the Ming dynasty, have been
extraordinary. He did more than anyone to try and discover every bit of
science and technology he could find in all the Chinese texts still available.
And he inspired a whole generation of science historians to commit
themselves to pursuing the questions he asked. His contributions have also
helped to build Chinese national pride and give a new sense of direction to
modern scholarship about the nature of Chinese civilization. His achievements
have even crossed the boundaries of the Taiwan Straits between the
Nationalists and the Communists. Despite the fact that his intellectual
starting-point was the Marxist affirmation of the universality of science,
Nationalist scholars have acknowledged his achievements by having his SCC
volumes translated together with several of his collected essays and lectures.
Mainland historians of science are doing the same. No other modern scholar
has work respected so widely on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. The
consensus is that Needham helped to restore pride and confidence to a
generation in China that thought progress could only come from Western
science.
What about the idea that Needham had discovered a science civilization
for China? This stemmed from his conviction that civilization is a product of
millennia of human effort, and many different peoples in different parts of the
world have contributed to scientific progress. The eventual rise of modern
science in one part of the world to form a mighty river of new knowledge was
the result of many streams and tributaries flowing into it from many other
parts of the world. Therefore, the varieties of primitive or mediaeval science,
pre-modern or proto science meant that a science civilization could have
existed prior to the explosive developments of the past three centuries. This is
not to say that China’s civilization was built on scientific ideas. But
Needham’s work suggests that the world will share one single global
civilization and that China made scientific contributions to that.
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Wang Gungwu
How the Needham story began highlights the difficulty of discovering
that science for China. He went to China for the first time in the midst of the
Sino-Japanese War when the Chinese government had retreated to its wartime
capital in Chongqing. Many of its scientists had no laboratories to work in and
some were helping historians evaluate the achievements of Chinese
civilization. They were writing the history of mathematics, agriculture,
alchemy, printing, ceramics, building construction, hydraulic engineering and
records of astronomy and natural disasters. Among them were scientists who
had studied outside China, for example, Liu Xianzhou 刘仙洲, a graduate of
the University of Hong Kong who wrote a history of engineering, and a
student from Malaya, Huang Hsing-Chung (黄兴宗), who was among the
young scientists in Chongqing inspired by Needham’s enquiries. There was
growing curiosity about what the ancient Chinese had been able to achieve
without the benefit of modern science. The research that was being published
at the time made only modest claims but, for Needham who was coming fresh
to all this, it aroused his profound interest.
No one expected Needham to change his life and devote the rest of his
life to his mammoth project. On the eve of a dramatic change in Chinese
history, the victory of the Communists over the Nationalists, Needham’s own
Marxist views were congenial to those who saw their revolutionary victory as
progress pre-determined by scientific laws of society and history. But he went
further than anyone else by questioning the widely held view that Chinese
civilization had been blighted by its Middle Kingdom complex and suffered
from its self-sufficiency, complacency and inertia.
Needham set out to answer the question, why did China not develop
modern science? He suggested that, when the Chinese met the Jesuits who
came to Peking in the early 17th century, Chinese science began to be fused
into the universality of modern science. He looked for China’s many scientific
and technological achievements and tried his utmost to find elements of
theory and practice that could be seen as pre-modern science. Has Needham
helped us determine that China had a science civilization? Or was Chinese
civilization simply one of the cultural manifestations of a global civilization,
perhaps a science civilization with Chinese characteristics?
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Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
A different question is, can China’s ancient civilization survive as one
bolstered by modern science and technology but still recognizably Chinese? It
is interesting that there is today renewed interest in the idea of ‘Chinese
learning as foundation and Western learning for application’ that was so
cogently stated by Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 more than a hundred years ago.
His pithy words put the emphasis on science as a method, an instrument,
merely a means to master the secrets of advanced technology in order to gain
national wealth and power. Therefore, it was compatible with various kinds of
cultural values, whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Chinese. The idea can
even be used to support the call for a re-affirmation of ‘Asian values’ (Asian
values as essence, Western sciences for application) and used to defend
against the push towards a universal civilization.
Needham insisted that modern ‘mathematized natural science’ demands
a common philosophical position about the nature of the universe. Although
this position was first arrived at in the West about 400 years ago, it was, in his
view, the result of world-wide developments all flowing into a single
mainstream, converging and consolidating human scientific gains over
thousands of years. Contributions came from the Egyptians, the Babylonians,
the Indians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Western Europeans and
North Americans, and so on, but ultimately the advances belong to
everybody.
His efforts to find science in Chinese civilization were largely to prove
that China, despite its distance from the most recent scientific discoveries,
was always part of world history. The progress of pre-modern science in
China might have been obstructed by political institutions and local cultural
values, but the capacity for science is clear in what the Chinese have been
able to produce over the centuries. Needham sought to establish that a science
civilization for China is a legitimate claim, something all Chinese can identify
with and be proud of.
Needham set out to do what seemed impossible and succeeded beyond
perhaps even his greatest expectations. He had taken the Chinese heritage
back to its origins and moved hundreds of scholars to help him explore its
precious treasures. He thus has given Chinese history and civilization an
added dimension. By identifying science in Chinese civilization, he
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Wang Gungwu
encouraged new generations to work for a future science civilization. They
now do so with the confidence that their world of science has a distinguished
pedigree; it is not merely borrowed from outside, and not simply an imitation
of what the West has to offer. They can be confident because China has
always been part of that river of science that was destined to flow into the
great ocean it now is. Needham would be the first to say that his work was
only a beginning. Many others will have to continue that work and extend its
boundaries if China is to enjoy the benefits of scientific thinking in every
realm of knowledge.
Needham’s Question
I first met Needham in Cambridge in 1956 after the first two volumes
of his great work were published. He questioned me about my work on
Southeast Asian trading commodities for the China market before the Song
dynasty and on Chinese knowledge about the plants and animals they used for
medicinal purposes that came from that region. His approach was thorough
and inclusive. No detail escaped his attention. Although my interest had
moved to political and institutional history away from the study the material
culture contacts between China and Southeast Asia, I remained interested in
the main thrust of his questioning and kept in contact with his work through
my friends and colleagues at the University of Malaya and the Australian
National University, Ho Peng Yoke 何丙郁 and Wang Ling 王铃, who were
both Needham’s close collaborators. Through their work for Needham, in
particular, Wang Ling’s lifelong interest in ‘the gunpowder epic’ and Ho
Peng Yoke’s pursuit of the science of Chinese astronomy, I was able to follow
the many facets of the Needham question.
Many scholars are still intrigued by Needham’s question. Why did
China not develop modern science? The question has never been answered to
everyone’s satisfaction. There is still a lingering feeling that unless we know
the answer, China may not be able to develop science further on its own. To
go back to Needham’s own words,
What was it then that happened at the Renaissance in Europe whereby
mathematised natural science came into being? Any why did this not occur in
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Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
China? If it is difficult enough to find out why modern science developed in
one civilization, it may be even more difficult to find out why it did not
develop in another. Yet the study of an absence can throw bright light upon a
presence. The problem of the fruitful union of mathematics with science is,
indeed, only another way of stating the whole problem of why it was that
modern science developed in Europe at all (SCC, vol. III, p. 154).
Historians are drawn to speculations about the way Chinese civilization
prevented its inventiveness from progressing to modern science. As Needham
had stressed, that civilization was based on a philosophy that was holistic and
organismic. It rested on the absolute authoritarianism of both the family and
state systems in limiting knowledge collaboration and technology transfer,
and depended on an examination-based bureaucracy that looked down on the
discoveries of peasants and artisans.
In numerous texts, Needham found records of solving mathematical
problems, of astronomical observations and calculations, of innovative
agricultural tools and techniques, of alchemical experiments, the discovery of
gunpowder and development of printing, and of mechanisms in the ‘heavenly
clock’. These were remarkable discoveries by any standards. Many of them
have been accepted as support for the idea that China might have developed
modern science had the circumstances been more favourable.
Needham’s question thus aroused many scientists in and out of China to
try and answer it. It has also intrigued philosophers and historians of science,
as well as sociologists of knowledge. The literature on this subject is large and
the efforts show that the question is worth asking because it helped to refine
the concept of science for different periods of history. At the same time, it
also further illuminated the richness of the Chinese cultural heritage.
Several sinologists have examined the Needham puzzle from the point
of view of Chinese thought, for example, Angus Graham (1919-1991) and
Derk Bodde (1909-2003). Like many others, they were dubious about asking
a negative question. Some probed the problem through assumptions that had
been made about early logical thought in China and showed that Needham
underestimated the thinking in the Mohist School and was uncritical about the
Taoists. Others claimed that we could only understand Chinese ideas in their
own terms. There are also warnings against Needham’s teleological
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Wang Gungwu
assumption about the ultimate universality of science. Nevertheless, the
comparative approach he insisted on has been stimulating and rewarding.
Others argue that we simply do not know enough about all the facets of
early science and the conceptual framework in which the scientific and
technological developments had taken place. Despite that, many still support
Needham in saying that what we do know shows the scientific mind at work.
Even those who doubt that China ever had a science civilization endorse the
usefulness of his question in probing the origins of China’s material culture
that laid the foundations for the robust response to modern science today.
At the time when Needham died, I recall reading the work of two
physicists from China who disagreed with each other about how the Needham
question should be treated. I mention this here because hundreds of others in
China have been offering answers during the past two decades, leading me to
think that the question may be too important to be left to scientists. Their two
opposite views are examples of what continues to tax us all. One of the
physicists, Qian Wenyuan 钱文远, who had turned to study economics and
history, did not share the Marxist assumptions about the ‘universality of
science’ prior to Newtonian physics. He thought that the technical inventions
of the Chinese did not add up to anything that is recognizable as science. The
cultural inertia in Chinese civilization inhibited the kind of experimentation,
initiative and creativity that modern science needs.
The other, Chen Cheng-Yih (Cheng Zhenyi 程贞一), argued that
scientific thought in traditional China deserves even more careful research
than Needham has given it. While he stopped short of claiming that China had
a science civilization before modern times, he suggested that Needham was
too Eurocentric to have asked the right questions of the many sources which
he had used. He therefore set out to prove that the ancient Chinese were
thinking more scientifically than we have given them credit for.
The contrast between the two scientists warns against defining science
anachronistically, or too narrowly. If the definition is too broad, almost any
rational argument could be made to appear scientific. If it is too narrow, then
nothing deserves the name of science until the age of Galileo and Newton.
Similarly, when every rational argument could be scientific, it is possible to
show that China has had a science civilization from early times; with the
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Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
narrow definition, however, it would have to be the West that introduced a
science civilization to China.
Some sociologists and economic historians have also been inspired by
Needham’s view that the rise of capitalism and the bourgeois classes was the
driving-force in the rapid advances in science and technology in the West.
They have followed up every one of Needham’s questions and statements and
found that he had pursued the question further than he had intended when he
first asked it in his 1944 essay ‘On Science and Social Change’. Needham had
simply turned every stone to find China’s lost traditions of scientific inquiry
and led him also to reexamine all institutional explanations for the rise of
modern science in the West. He contrasted them with those of China and the
Islamic world. He looked at the legal conditions for protecting scholarship in
early European universities against Church and State that he considered
essential if independent inquiries were to be pursued. This was conceptually
impossible in China even during the relatively tolerant Song dynasty, least of
all during the much more restrictive Ming and Qing dynasties. Without
protection given to scientists to pursue their researches freely and fearlessly, it
would seem that science civilization could not have been born.
Several economic historians have turned their attention to the
institutional lacunas at critical periods in Chinese history, notably the
centuries between the end of the Song and the mid-Qing 18th century. They
do not agree on the specifics but accept the idea that technological ingenuity
was not enough to explain the rise of capitalism or modern science. But,
whether they were hostile to, skeptical or warmly supportive of, the Needham
thesis, their work made it impossible to ignore the possibility that China had
the seeds of a science civilization before the Chinese realized there was such a
thing.
Science Civilization
When Needham’s book first appeared, Western scholars tended to be
condescending towards someone whom they thought had ‘gone native’ and
become something of a ‘China lover’. Some were plainly dismissive on the
grounds that he had either done inadequate scientific research, or that he had
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Wang Gungwu
political and ideological reasons for what he wrote. What was central to
Needham’s discoveries, however, was the way he asked questions about the
nature of civilization.
What was special about Chinese civilization? The literature on the
subject was growing, but the resilience of some Chinese traditions in the face
of foreign threats, military defeats, political decline and civilizational decay
was striking. The 20th century saw a new confidence in a China that was
guided by science. For many Chinese, this was so not only in technical
advances but also in the new political system and ideology for Chinese state
and society. When the Academy of Sciences was restructured in 1949 under
the presidency of the historian, poet and ideologue Guo Moruo 郭沫若
(1892-1978), all knowledge was included under Science, even if some
knowledge was not exactly scientifically informed.
Many writings began to speak of three or four thousand years of
scientific and cultural achievements. This was interesting because no Chinese
scientist claimed that ancient Chinese had developed science. There were
different opinions as to why that was so. While arguing that this was nothing
to be ashamed of, many agreed that Chinese civilization declined drastically
because it had no science like that of the modern West. However, there was
unanimity that China needed scientific education urgently in order to save
China and revive Chinese civilization. China will never make the mistake of
neglecting science again.
There was by that time total acceptance that science was coming from
the West and that acquiring that science was essential. The struggle among the
major protagonists had gone on for decades. During 19th century, there was
only willingness to learn the science needed to strengthen China militarily
against the enemies of the empire. But the barriers against Western scientific
thought were fast crumbling. There came thinkers such as Kang Youwei 康
有为 (1858-1927) and Yan Fu 严复 (1854-1921) who showed a greater
willingness to learn from the West even though they could not agree on what
and how much to learn. From then to the 1950s, there was intense debate
before positions were hardened and politicized. The battle lines shifted from
the importance of science to the nature of the Chinese state and civilization.
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Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
When the Marxist ideologues won in 1949, the official view was that
all knowledge was progressively scientific, and civilization only advanced
when it became scientific. This was a big step from the position 30 years
earlier in 1919, at the beginning of the May Fourth Movement, when most
literate Chinese were still confident that the ethical principles that provided
the foundations of Chinese civilization were sound. Learning science to
strengthen China was not a threat to the core of that great civilization. But,
after decades of intense debates, the position was reversed. In order to save
China, Confucian and other moral and political traditions had to be replaced
altogether by scientific thought and commitments to modern methodologies,
even if it meant the discarding of received wisdom.
This included the idea that Neo-Confucian ideas and practices were
obstacles to progress. At the least, they needed thorough reform and, for the
revolutionaries, they were better thrown out altogether. There were thinkers
who were aware of an underlying contradiction in that position. There was no
denying that national salvation needed more science and technology and deep
understanding of the values that made science effective and countries rich and
powerful. At the same time, national salvation also required a rejuvenation of
the Chinese people and pride in their national identity that meant they should
not reject their heritage.
Thinkers like Yan Fu, who had studied chemistry, physics and
mathematics in England, were clear on this point. Although he introduced
China to the ideas of Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer; to the work
of Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill and others, he remained
wedded to the restoration of traditional Chinese culture. His younger
contemporaries learnt their science indirectly through Japan, and were also
influential in calling for a new spirit of scholarship. All of them resisted the
idea that the civilization of the West was superior to the civilization of China.
Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873-1929) was a foremost modernizer; but, after
seeing what happened to Europe at the end of World War I, he publicly
denounced the ‘materialistic’ civilization that led to such destruction and
slaughter.
Yan Fu’s role highlights the early exposure to modern science in the
West. There had been Yung Wing (Rong Hong 容闳, 1828-1912), whose
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Yale education led him to believe that sending young Chinese boys to schools
in the United States would be the best preparation for the modern world.
Although the program was discontinued, the impact in the field of engineering
was recognized. Then came examples of boys who grew up or were born
outside China and exposed early to science in English schools. The best
known, Ng Choy 伍才 (Wu Tingfang 伍廷芳, 1842-1922), Ho Kai (He Qi
何启, 1859-1914) and Sun Yat-sen (孙逸仙, 1866-1925), all had their
education in Hong Kong, though Sun had started in Hawaii. Two of them
went on to graduate in medicine, a field considered by most Chinese at the
time to be the best part of science.
The fact that Ng Choy was born in Malacca reminds us that British
Malaya also contributed to early Chinese exposure to scientific education.
Three men were outstanding and all of them had studied scientific subjects
abroad before returning from the West. The first of them actually reacted
against that modernity and warned against losing faith in Chinese
civilizational values. He was Ku Hung-ming (Gu Hongming 辜 鸿 铭 ,
1857-1928), of Penang who was thoroughly soaked in a basic Scottish
education, including a good grounding in science and mathematics that
enabled him to get an engineering degree in Germany. He was local-born and
descended from several generations of traders settled in Kedah and Penang,
and eventually went to work in China. Despite his training in the sciences, he
argued strenuously against adopting ‘the intensely materialistic civilization of
modern Europe’.
The other two went to English schools in the Straits Settlements and
had similar backgrounds. Lim Boon Keng (Lin Wen Qing 林文庆) of
Singapore (1869-1957) went to Raffles Institution and then did his medical
studies at the University of Edinburgh. This enabled him to have a brilliant
career in Singapore before taking up the presidency of the University of
Amoy (Xiamen). He did not reject the West and wanted his students to have a
good science education. Nevertheless, given his peranakan family background,
he was convinced of the value of Confucianism and went to great pains to
preserve that tradition. However, at Amoy University this did not go down
well with the younger generation of Chinese who were in the midst of heated
debates about the value of science. He had the misfortune of being the target
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Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
of one of the sharpest critics of the age, the famous writer Lu Xun 鲁迅, who
mocked him for being an archconservative. Lu Xun’s writings are better
known, so Lim Boon Keng has gone down in history not as the keen supporter
of science education that he actually was but as the diehard defender of a
dying faith, a reputation that he did not deserve. His story captures that
moment when science became part of the politicized polemics of China and
anyone who did not give it primacy was thrust aside.
The third person who went to English school and then to a British
university was Gnoh Lean Tuck (Wu Lien-the or Liande 伍连德 1879-1960)
from Penang where he studied at the Penang Free School. Ten years younger
than Lim Boon Keng and twenty years younger than Ku Hung-ming, he had
no hesitations about the urgent need for progress in China. His career is now
celebrated as a symbol of advances in the medical sciences. Less well known
is the fact that he co-authored a history of Chinese medicine that was
published in 1932. That work marked an early enquiry into the basis of
medical knowledge, a generation before the systematic research by Joseph
Needham and his colleagues.
It is remarkable how debates about science and civilization could have
led to so much political passion. The debates coincided with a period of
disunity and civil war, with desperate efforts by patriotic youth to forge a
strong national movement to reunify China. Western ideas were sifted through
in search of formulas that would solve China’s problems. The scientists were
in the forefront of the debates, notably the new American trained group
around the Science Society founded by Jen Hung-chun (Ren Hongjun 任鸿隽
1886-1961), Ding Wenjiang (丁文江 1887-1936) and Zhu Kezhen (竺可桢
1890-1970), who led the call for better science education in all Chinese
universities. But, even there, the political debate drowned their voices, led by
people who did not have science training but were engaged in largely
ideological struggles.
One example was the young philosopher Fung Yu-lan (Feng Youlan 冯
友兰 1895-1990) who, while studying at Columbia University in 1922, wrote
an article, ‘Why China has no science - an interpretation of the history and
consequences of Chinese philosophy’. He asked the question because he was
concerned that the lack of science was the key reason why China was weak
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Wang Gungwu
and backward. This view was widely held among the proponents of science
during the 1920s.
Strong voices for science education had already been raised in China
the decade before in essays by Chen Duxiu (陈独秀 1879-1942), an admirer
of Western civilization through his visits to Japan and Europe, and by Hu Shi
(胡适 1891-1962), after his return from Cornell University in 1917. These two
were illustrative of the political division that followed the May Fourth
Movement. Both started from similar positions. They had strong classical
education, but this did not stand in the way of their fervent wish to see “Mr.
Science and Mr. Democracy” prevail in China. Chen Duxiu was more radical
and went on to espouse the revolutionary ideals of Marxism and communism.
Hu Shi remained the liberal humanist who shied away from politics, but
supported the spread of the scientific method into all aspects of learning and
education. At the time, they both contributed to the excitement among the
young for ‘the scientific spirit’. The Young China Study Association
expressed this succinctly: Young China must be creative, socially responsible,
and must adopt ‘a scientific approach’ to all facets of reform for the
development of China.
A new batch of modernizers had taken over. The older generation was
appalled at their iconoclasm and increasingly noisy calls to ‘Smash the
Confucius Shop’. But their objections, on the whole, fell on deaf ears. What
was more striking was the divide among the younger modernizers themselves.
Daniel Kwok’s study of Scientism in Chinese Thought (1965) has given us a
clear outline of the dimensions of the debate. Whether old or young, those
who opposed the challenge of positivist science were defeated. After 1923,
science had become something of a sacred cow. Scientism, almost a new
religion, had won the day.
It was a pyrrhic victory. The resultant politicization of science as a
measure of everything progressive had appropriated the intellectual discourse
about a subject that was much more complex, that is, the nature of civilization
and how it can help the process of modernization. Everything that was
opposed to inherited values and received traditions was seen as scientific. All
else was backward to be rejected. This view continued among the polemicists
into the 1930s and 1940s. One extreme statement that came from the Preface
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Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
to a new magazine, Ershi shiji (Twentieth Century) in 1931, sums up how
much that generation wanted a science civilization for China:
Ever since science started with Bacon, all imponderable
things, such as God, soul, and so on, have been driven outside of
nature, society, and the pineal gland [mind]. Science alone supports
the entire realm of knowledge, and all processes. All social
activities and all the spiritual workings have become the object of
science and have entered the domain of science.
Under such conditions, the world of nature, the world of
society, and the world of knowledge are all united and form one
large system. Science and philosophy are not mutually exclusive;
the huge gulf between natural science and social science has been
filled ......What is this new science? It is an active view of nature,
an active view of society, an active view of economics, an active of
politics, and an active view of ethics (quoted from Kwok 1965, pp.
172-173).
This was an all-embracing view. It was also almost irresistible to the
young and progressive. It put all future efforts to explain the heritage of
Chinese civilization on the defensive.
What was ironic was that that author, Ye Qing (叶青 1896-1990; his
real name was Ren Zhuoxuan 任卓宣), was a communist who had renounced
communism a few years earlier. In his anti-communist writings, however, he
echoed what the Marxist intellectuals fully embraced, the need to be scientific
in everything, and thus indirectly gave support to the view that only Marxism
embodied that approach through scientific socialism and dialectical
materialism. It was thereafter but an easy step to painting everything as either
black or white. Marxism-Leninism stood for all that was scientific and
progressive, while the Nationalists who cared about tradition were backward
and unscientific.
The polarization became uncritically accepted among most of the
rebellious young during the 1930s and 1940s. My fellow students in Nanjing
in 1947 and 1948 voiced similar feelings during the compulsory
indoctrination classes on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People and
Chen Li-fu’s Sheng Zhi Yuanli (The Philosophy of Life). Chen Li-fu (陈立夫
1900-2001) was a former minister of education of the Nationalist government
and one of Chiang Kai-shek’s closest advisers. He was a mining engineer
15
Wang Gungwu
trained in the United States who tried hard to marry modern scientific ideas
and methods to what he considered well worth preserving in Chinese
civilization. But his attempts to show that there was no contradiction between
tradition and science, and that Chinese civilization was compatible with the
development of a modern scientific country was treated largely with disdain.
In short, those who clamoured loudest for a science civilization for
China started with the premise that there had never been any science worth
speaking of in Chinese civilization. Even the defenders of that ancient
civilization who described the glories of material culture and the intellectual
brilliance and artistic genius of their ancestors made no strong claims to its
having had a scientific base of any kind.
At that point, during the war years in Chungking, Joseph Needham first
encountered this worship of science, often accompanied by an inferiority
complex about China having had an unscientific past. Needham’s position as
Scientific Counselor in the British Embassy was to support scientific
development in China. His own knowledge of China at that time, in his own
eyes, was minimal, but his sympathies were clear. In any case, no Western
sinologist, least of all a natural scientist, thought that the word science could
be applied to Chinese civilization. When Francis Bacon and many others after
him spoke of the important inventions of gunpowder, printing and the
magnetic compass, these were seen as splendid examples of at most creative
technology or applied science rather than what modern scholars would
recognize as science. The Chinese scientists whom Needham met in China in
the 1940s would not have disagreed with that. What they wanted was a
science civilization in the future. It never occurred to them that it might be
worth the effort to try and demonstrate that China had more science than
anyone realized.
Needham’s achievements have to be seen in this context. Although he
was not the first to study early artifacts and documents in search of Chinese
science, he was the first to take a comprehensive view. In the face of the
received views and ideas prevalent when he began his work 70 years ago, how
impossible, even futile, possibly even pointless, his task must have seemed.
Yet it is not only the heroic effort at embarking on this difficult job that we
now celebrate; it is also the fact that he had opened the eyes of so many
16
Science Civilization for China:
Before and After Needham
people about the nature of Chinese civilization and forced us all to ask
questions that no one had cared to ask before. Thanks largely to his efforts, no
one today would leave out China when they study the history of science.
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