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Letters to the editors

Vol. 6, NO. 3 / November 2021

Needham’s Systematic Curiosity

Yinyin Xue,
reply by Shellen Wu

In response to “On Science and Civilisation in China”

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To the editors:

Shellen Wu’s essay struck a nice balance between telling a good story and providing a critical review of a gigantic collection that has been well studied. Unlike many other classic texts, Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) is a multi-volume project that was born over sixty years ago and is still growing. Spanning World War II, the Cold War, and continuing into the twenty-first century, a proper account of the long and complicated story of SCC requires a meticulous narrator with great historical sympathy. Wu proved to be such a narrator.

It is refreshing that Wu presented SCC as the fruit of a collaboration among contributors from diverse backgrounds, rather than, as she puts it, “the intellectual progeny of one man.” Aside from the mentions of Lu Gwei-djen, Zhu Kezhen, and others, this was also evident from Wu’s choice of the food science volume—authored by Huang Tsing-Tsung and published in 2001—to illustrate the general approach of SCC. In other accounts, the SCC series has been presented as inseparable from its founder, Joseph Needham. By diverting attention away from Needham, Wu provides a broader perspective that enables a reevaluation of SCC.

I was surprised that Wu chose to introduce SCC by comparing it to an encyclopedia. She begins the essay with a description of soy sauce, excerpted from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and suggests that if one wants to know more about the topic, SCC has an entire volume devoted to fermentation and food science. What sets SCC apart from the Encyclopedia Britannica, as this comparison suggests, is that SCC is more comprehensive and offers far more detailed descriptions of Chinese achievements in science and technology.

This comparison left me wondering about the ongoing relevance of SCC. As a body of knowledge, or simply a catalog of inventions, SCC is no longer awe-inspiring.1 As Timothy Brook observed, it is largely due to Needham’s work that the great achievements of the Chinese scientific tradition have now become common knowledge.2 This may also be the reason why Wu described the experience of reading SCC as delightful and comforting. At first glance, this might seem a surprising description for a series of books that are sufficiently numerous to occupy an entire bookshelf. Today, the joy of reading SCC comes from the defamiliarization of common knowledge. A reader might find reading a volume of SCC relaxing and pleasant only if they treat the series as something akin to a database—an assemblage of interesting pieces of knowledge, but not necessarily a systematic one.

Needham may not have had this approach in mind when he laid out his magisterial seven-volume plan for the series. For Needham, who became fascinated with China in the 1930s, the objects under study were not part of his daily experience or common knowledge. Gathering materials on the history of Chinese science and technology was an adventure in a foreign culture. Throughout all the volumes, no matter the subjects, the central question posed by Needham was profoundly systematic: Why did modern science not develop in China? But, as Brook puts it, there was also a deeper question Needham had in mind: Why did capitalism not develop in China?3 It is only natural that Needham took a civilizational approach to write his grand history of Chinese science, because science was the vehicle he used to explore Chinese civilization, and eventually, to see European civilization from the outside.4

In the preface to the first volume, Needham described the readership he imagined for SCC:

The present book is addressed, in fact, not to sinologists, nor to the widest circles of the general public, but to all educated people, whether themselves scientists or not, who are interested in the history of science, scientific thought and technology, in relation to the general history of civilisation, and especially the comparative development of Asia and Europe.5

An ideal reader of SCC is therefore not necessarily an expert in the field of China studies, but someone who shares Needham’s systematic curiosity about another culture.6

Although the first volume of SCC seems the most dated, it also remains the most revolutionary. As the series has expanded to include more and more volumes, it now increasingly resembles an encyclopedia. Over time, SCC has drifted further and further from Needham’s original vision of a series that was comprehensive but not exhaustive.7 In this sense, I do not share Wu’s conclusion that SCC has exceeded Needham’s expectations. On the contrary, the fact that historians of science view SCC as an outdated classic and non-expert readers approach it as a collection of exotic knowledge would be quite to Needham’s disappointment.

Yinyin Xue

Shellen Wu replies:

Yinyin Xue raises a fascinating issue in her thought-provoking letter about my essay on Joseph Needham and the Science and Civilisation series. In reading the letter and the Timothy Brook essay that Xue cited, originally written in memoriam after Needham’s death in 1995, I was reminded of the widely copied and modified quote from the early nineteenth-century philosopher Joseph de Maistre that “every nation gets the government it deserves.” Every generation gets the sinology it deserves. At the time of Needham’s death, part of the larger debate among sinologists was not just over why science but also why capitalism did not develop in China. This discussion was rooted in the seeds of capitalism question raised by Marxist historians in mainland China, as well as abroad. Brook, in his essay, astutely pointed out this subtext and how this question about the origins of capitalism informed Needham’s early writings. As a Marxist and internationalist inspired by Soviet discourse, Needham had begun to pay attention to the social and economic conditions for the development of science as early as the 1930s. In many ways Needham’s concerns about the necessary conditions for the development of science naturally extended to the economic organization of societies.

By the time Brook wrote his essay in 1996, this debate on the seeds of capitalism in China had already petered out. Since then, China’s rise and embrace of neoliberal values have made the issue moot, its disappearance from scholarly discussions the main reason why it didn’t occur to me to bring it up in my essay. Visit major cities in China today and it is hard to argue that Chinese are somehow culturally ill-suited for capitalism.

The SCC volumes have outlasted Needham as well as these once all-consuming questions in sinology. Work on the series has continued. What Needham had once envisioned as a single book, then seven, has ballooned to cover a wall of volumes. History of science has moved on. Sinology has moved on. Yet, we still go back and use the SCC, in ways that perhaps Needham himself had never intended and would disapprove of. The work has exceeded the man.

DOI: 10.37282/991819.21.61
  1. In his popular biography of Needham, Simon Winchester provides a list of Chinese inventions and discoveries, in alphabetical order with dates of first mention, as an appendix. Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). ↩
  2. Timothy Brook, “The Sinology of Joseph Needham,” Modern China 22, no. 3 (1996): 340, doi:10.1177/009770049602200304. ↩
  3. Brook, “The Sinology of Joseph Needham,” 344. ↩
  4. Brook, “The Sinology of Joseph Needham,” 341. ↩
  5. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 8. ↩
  6. Here I borrow the term systematic curiosity from Amartya Sen. In his article “Indian Traditions and Western Imagination,” Sen argues that Western scholars take three dominant approaches to interpret the intellectual traditions of India: the exoticist approach, the magisterial approach, and the curatorial approach. Altogether they have exaggerated the nonmaterial and arcane aspects of Indian traditions compared to its more rationalistic and analytical elements. If we replace India with China, Needham provides a nearly perfect example of the curatorial approach, which relates to systematic curiosity toward another culture, including various attempts at noting, classifying, and exhibiting diverse aspects of a culture. See Amartya Sen, “Indian Traditions and Western Imagination,” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (2005 [1997]): 168–85, doi:10.1162/001152605774431428. ↩
  7. Following his description of the imagined readers, in the preface to the first volume, Needham wrote,
    Its intention is therefore to be comprehensive in the sense of leaving out nothing important, but not exhaustive in the sense of a paper in a learned journal, or a book such as [Berthold] Laufer’s Sino-Iranica, in which the most minute points of detail are examined and turned over in footnotes occupying more space than the text itself.
    Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 1:8. ↩

Yinyin Xue is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee.

Shellen Wu is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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