To the editors:

I have read with interest and admiration Shellen Wu’s essay as well as dozens of related works that have provided additional perspectives.¹ Before addressing Wu’s broad themes and specific content, a note of full disclosure: Joseph Needham was a friend of mine. One of my most prized possessions is a copy of the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China (SCC), inscribed to me in a still-strong hand by “Joseph Needham, The Ten-Constellation Daoist 十宿道人.”

I have never known anyone as intellectually curious as Joseph, who, during his first visit to Rice University in 1983, asked questions about everything he saw, from the flora (Quercus virginiana) to the fauna (Homo sapiens studentius).² But Joseph’s curiosity did not extend to one of my own intellectual interests, the Yijing, also known as the I Ching or Book of Changes. To be sure, he kept in his vast files—now in the Needham Institute archives—a great number of book manuscripts, articles, and essays on the Yijing that had been sent to him by scholars from all parts of the globe, but he paid little attention to them, aside from writing polite notes of acknowledgment, and occasionally sending the works themselves to colleagues for scrutiny.³

Wu has done an excellent job in describing how Needham, a world-renowned biochemist, came to love China, and how his attraction to both the country and one of its citizens, Lu Gwei-djen, led him to produce the magnificent multi-volume, co-authored study SCC.⁴

Wu’s summary of the evolving assessments of Needham’s work, which moved from “universal praise for the early volumes” to “more measured” evaluations, highlights the so-called Needham Question: “Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only [emphasis original] in the West, at the time of Galileo?”⁵ As Wu points out, by framing the question in this way, Needham was, in effect, asking what went wrong in China from the seventeenth century until the twentieth.

Scholars such as Benjamin Elman and Nathan Sivin, among others, have been at pains to show that the development of Chinese science and technology has not been a narrative of failure, even after 1600.⁶ And yet there can be no doubt that, measured by the scientific and technological achievements of Western nations—in particular, their devastatingly effective guns, ships, and other engines of production and destruction in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—China was ill-equipped to contend with Western imperialism. Peter Perdue has persuasively argued that the rise of modern science and technology in the West “was intimately connected to the militarism and inter-state competition of the early modern autocratic European states,” who “fought incessantly, explored the non-Western world, plundered and devastated tropical environments, and enslaved and exterminated native peoples of Africa and the New World.”⁷

Now back to my friendly disagreement with Joseph over the place of the Yijing in the history of Chinese science.⁸ He laid down the gauntlet in 1969, writing:

I fear that we shall have to say that while the five-element [wuxing] and two-force [yinyang] theories were favourable rather than inimical to the development of scientific thought in China, the elaborated symbolic system of the Book of Changes was almost from the start a mischievous handicap. It tempted those who were interested in Nature to rest in explanations which were no explanations at all. The Book of Changes was a system for pigeon-holing novelty and then doing nothing about it. … It led to a stylisation of concepts almost analogous to the stylisations which have in some ages occurred in art forms and which finally prevented painters from looking at Nature at all.⁹

In a similar vein, Peng-Yoke Ho, another distinguished historian of Chinese science, wrote that if the Chinese “were fully satisfied with an explanation they could find from the system of the Book of Changes they would not go further to look for mathematical formulations and experimental verifications in their scientific studies.” Thus, he says, “Looking at the system of the Book of Changes in this light, one may regard it as one of the inhibiting factors in the development of scientific ideas in China.”¹⁰

It is easy enough to see why Needham and Ho might hold these views. As I have written elsewhere:

There was, in fact, very little about the natural world for which the Yijing symbolism did not provide some sort of explanation, as a glance at the index to any one of the many volumes in Needham’s monumental Science and Civilisation in China (under the heading “I Ching”) will reveal.¹¹ The terrain covered by the Changes included not only the fields we now know as mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine, but also other areas of scientific knowledge such as geography, topography, and cartography. The color and flow of blood, the anatomy of crustaceans, the physical constitution of people from different areas of China, acupuncture and pulse points, chemical and alchemical reactions, the nature of earthquakes, musical tonality, and a great deal more were all explained by reference to trigrams, hexagrams, or both.¹²

But should the Yijing be blamed for standing in the way of Chinese science? Sivin has condemned efforts to “turn the history of world science into a saga of Europe’s success and everyone else’s failure.” But even he admits that although China experienced a genuine “scientific revolution” in the seventeenth century, it

did not generate the same pitch of tension as the one going on in Europe at the same time. It did not burst forth in as fundamental a reorientation of thought about Nature. It did not cast doubt on all the traditional ideas of what constitutes an astronomical problem and what significance astronomical prediction can have for the ultimate understanding of Nature and of man’s relation to it. … Rather than replacing traditional values, the new values implicit in the foreign astronomical writings were used to perpetuate traditional values.¹³

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, science in Europe developed increasingly beyond the institutional control of either church or state. By contrast, in imperial China, the state’s intervention went essentially unchallenged.¹⁴ The result was that, although Chinese scholars produced an enormous amount of useful literature in mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences from the mid-sixteenth century through the nineteenth,¹⁵ this new information did not result in any significant political, social, or economic transformations. Despite noteworthy achievements in Chinese astronomical science, new knowledge of the heavens had virtually no impact on state-sponsored astrology, which—when expressed in calendars, almanacs, and officially mandated rituals—quite literally dictated the rhythms of Chinese political, social, and ritual life at all levels.¹⁶

Similarly, new scientific discoveries—including those introduced by the Jesuits in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—did nothing to dislodge the Yijing from its exalted epistemological position as a source of unchallenged knowledge about the world and the cosmos. To be sure, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century scholars such as Huang Zongxi, Wang Fuzhi, Fang Yizhi, and Jiang Yong promoted experimentation, explored technical topics that included medicine, mathematics, light and sound, magnetism, and hydraulics, and developed sophisticated arguments to promote and defend their views. But their understanding of the natural world was profoundly influenced by Yijing-related cosmological and numerological ideas.¹⁷

At the same time, the Yijing—with its recondite symbolism of numbers, trigrams, and hexagrams, and its cryptic judgments and line statements featuring language that, to quote the Yijing itself, “twists and turns but hits the mark”—encouraged an approach to knowledge that left a great deal of room for uncertainty, and not of the Heisenberg sort.¹⁸ As Shen Gua, an eleventh-century scholar whom Needham considered one of the greatest scientific minds in Chinese history, remarked:

It seems that those who discourse on numbers [i.e., all regularities that make predictions possible] can only deal with their crude after-traces [ji]. There is a very subtle [wei] aspect to numbers that those who rely on mathematical astronomy are unable to know; and what they can know of this aspect is, all the more, only after-traces.¹⁹

As Sivin describes, the Chinese typically believed that

natural processes wove a pattern of constant relations too subtle and too multivariant to be understood completely by what we would call empirical investigation or mathematical analysis. Scientific explanation merely expressed, for finite and practical human purposes, partial and indirect views of that fabric.²⁰

In the late eighteenth century, when the Chinese examination system began to reflect an interest in “evidential research” by requiring rigorous “scientific” analysis of ancient texts, scholars continued to believe that the Yijing and other classical works offered the most profound and ultimately valuable knowledge.²¹ At certain times, the exams tested knowledge of “natural studies” (ziran zhi xue), including astronomy and mathematical harmonics, but on the whole it was knowledge of the classics, morality, and statecraft that preoccupied most Chinese scholars and loomed largest in the exams.²²

The fact remains that science in pre-twentieth-century China never went through a stage like the Newtonian phase of classical mechanics, with its emphasis on both direct observation and the mathematization of hypothesis. Although the binary structure of the hexagrams and other symbols in the Yijing inspired the philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz when he learned of it from a Jesuit missionary to China in the late seventeenth century, the Chinese themselves did not use hexagrams as computational numbers. As a result, the Yijing’s symbolism in imperial times remained numerological and, with the possible exception of the work of a few remarkable Yijing scholars such as Jiao Xun, never truly mathematical.²³

One final point. Although Joseph gave significant attention, in the second volume of SSC, to what he called the Chinese pseudosciences—including various forms of divination such as cleromancy, astrology, chronomancy, physiognomy, oneiromancy, glyphomancy, spirit-writing, and geomancy (fengshui)²⁴—it is clear that he was far more interested in what he described as “the sceptical tradition” of Chinese scholarship. He begins in the first century with an account with Wang Chong’s scientific thought and ends in the seventeenth with a brief note on the iconoclastic Qing scholar Yan Ruoqu.²⁵ Joseph focused primarily on the writings of highly literate elites, especially critics of inherited cosmological ideas, rather than more commonly accepted writings.²⁶

I believe that a more comprehensive history of science and technology in China would devote more attention to precisely these beliefs and practices, without reference to pejorative expressions such as “superstition” or “pseudoscience,” or to reductive categories such as “traditional” and “modern.”²⁷ As Carla Nappi has aptly remarked, in Ming and Qing dynasty China “there was … [no] single ‘Chinese’ way of knowing about nature”—nor, she adds, is there one to this day.²⁸

I don’t know if Needham would agree with these notions. But he would at least consider them.

Richard Smith

Shellen Wu replies:

My thanks to Richard Smith for sharing some anecdotes about his friendship with Needham. In his letter, Smith also reflects on a central question in the study of modern science in China. His disagreement with Needham on the importance of the Yijing, as he points out, underlines an important point of contention in the philosophy of science. Figures such as Needham, Peng-Yoke Ho, and in an earlier generation, Feng Youlan, debated how early Chinese philosophies shaped the understanding of nature and whether that worldview was detrimental to the rise of science.²⁹ Smith’s suggestion to take works such as the Yijing seriously, looking beyond the writings of the literate elites and devoting more attention to common beliefs and practices, is well taken. As he emphasizes, framing the philosophical underpinnings of the Yijing as merely superstition or pseudoscience gives short shrift to culturally pervasive views. The notion that popular beliefs can be dismissed in this manner has fallen out of favor among historians of science. Michael Gordin, for example, has argued that the emergence of so-called pseudoscience is an essential step in the process of demarcating the boundaries of what scholars consider science.³⁰

The greatest strength of Needham’s Science and Civilisation (SCC) series is its scope and depth. Philosophical issues, such as the influence of the Yijing on the development of Chinese science, are addressed in the first few volumes of SCC, even if, as Smith argues, Needham limits his inquiry to elite discourse. The question of how works such as the Yijing shaped the cultural understanding of nature beyond such circles is not seriously examined. But SCC does not stop there. In later volumes, Needham and his successors examine Chinese technological innovations much more broadly, investigating how technology was developed and used throughout Chinese society, not just the elite.

Speculation about how the Yijing may have limited the development of Chinese science remains just that: speculation. Scholars will never be able to answer such questions definitively. Nonetheless, in the use of practical technologies like gunpowder, Tonio Andrade has argued that the Chinese fell behind in significant and concrete ways. Andrade’s conclusions largely align with Peter Perdue’s argument about the connection between inter-state competition and the rise of science and technology. In the years before the First Opium War, Western observers were already deriding Chinese cannons and firearms as “mere blocks of wood,” “ill made” and “antiquated.”³¹ Clearly, Chinese firearms technology had not kept pace after its invention during the Song dynasty. This was not an isolated case.³²

It is not only in the lofty arenas of philosophy but also in the everyday uses of technology that science arises. In this respect, Smith’s call for historians of Chinese science to devote more attention to folk beliefs and practices dovetails with broader trends in the history of science. It is also a point emphasized by Needham himself and a number of the other authors of the SCC volumes, including Francesca Bray in her work on agriculture and Peter Golas in his volume on mining. In making a distinction between science and technology and carefully exhuming the evidence of technological innovation in Chinese history, Needham was well ahead of his time.