Simon Winchester's "The Man Who Loved China"

This story was not as gripping as I had hoped, nor as colourful. It was satisfactory but not something to rave about.

I learned a far bit about an iconic character whose books on science in China have been on "would like to read" list forever. I doubt I'll ever get around to them. But this book gives me a sense of what to expect from them.

I enjoyed the adventure in China by Joseph Needham. I was surprised that iwas only a short 4 years. I would have loved more illustrations, but then I guess the book would have been a travelogue and not a biography.

Winchester presents Needham as quite a sympathetic figure with all of his concern for the "common man" and his socialist enthusiasm. But when I read deeper in the book I became less enthralled. Here was a guy "full" of himself. He ran through a lot of women. The book doesn't make it clear whether there were a lot of broken hearts left behind, but my guess is that you don't sweep into somebody's life and dazzle them and leave them without leaving a lot of "loose ends" behind. That part of the story isn't covered since that would take some burnish off the great man's legacy. The part that really soured me was how he allowed himself to be duped into taking part in a communist front "scientific committee" that "investigated" claims of US biological weapons use. I can accept that he was naive and can't be blamed for signing up. But he can be blamed for not responding when he noticed that his old colleagues in China were strangely reserved while collaborating in this "investigation". He can be blamed for noticing the poverty and the Mao posters everywhere. Here's a guy who touted socialism because it "freed men's souls" walking around in China during the 1950s and 1960s seeing the glum people in their Mao uniforms with no joy, no life about them. But he never questioned "the Revolution". That is completely unacceptable.

This blindness is even more unacceptable given the history of the 1930s Stalinist show trials and the great disiullisionment with Communism that came from that and the Khrushchev revelations in the mid-1950s. But Needham remained a "fellow traveller" for his entire life. Winchester is eager to talk about the wonderful do-good attitude, but he never tallies up the do-bad consequences of this blinkered political approach. Winchester notes some aspects of Needham that rest uneasy: he claimed to want to bust things open and give the outsiders a chance, but at the same time he layered on more traditions at Caius College with more prayers for the rich donors to the college. Obviously contradictions and hypocrisy don't bother Winchester as much as they do me.

I think it is sadly funny that Winchester hints at the end of this book that the "great achievement" of Needham may recede in the future when the pressing question of "why did science not develop in China" gets lost as China re-enters world history. That is the funny thing about history. What one generation finds interesting or pivotal, another generation finds uninteresting or derivative. Before I read this book I would have said that Needham was pivotal. But now I would say he is not that interesting. Winchester achieved the opposite of what I think he intended. He taught me that a person who I thought was an intellectual hero was in fact a person with feet of clay, worse, a person whose great life's work ends up being a forgettable accomplishment. Sad.

There are a lot of themes that are not developed. Needham's wife, Dorothy, a long suffering partner who put up with Needham's affairs and who devoted her life to her own science was generally neglected. As he points out, she never attained a position and lived on research grant scraps her whole life. Also, he gives no insight into loyal assistants like Lu Gwei-djen and H. T. Huang. Maybe I'm a sourpuss but I take the Newtonian "standing on the shoulders of giants" seriously. Nobody plays a heroic role alone. The many assistants help hold them up. This book gives too much the impression that Needham was a solitary genius. Nope. There is enough in the book to show that wasn't the case, but on the other hand the book doesn't really address how much support Needham got.

So... a book worth reading but not a great book. It won't live you dazzled or full of new insight. It is a biography that sheds some light on one man's life. It is interesting. But not something I will dip into again and again.