The Needham Question
The Chinese began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?
A Cambridge academic called Joseph Needham (1900-1995) contributed so much to the study of science in China’s Middle Kingdom that the issue is the known as “the Needham question”. According to a recent article in “The Economist”:
“Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.”
I’ve been to China twice [my account here] and have some dear Chinese friends, so this is a question that I have certainly pondered. My own view is that it is to do with the Chinese way of thinking which has been excessively deferential to authority and reluctant to challenge conventional wisdom.
Europe was home to the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. The Chinese had none of these – but they’re catching up incredibly fast.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
>excessively deferential to authority and reluctant to challenge conventional wisdom
No David Davis in China, then!
August 20th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Another way of looking at this question would be to consider how they became so advanced in the first place.
Did the Chinese have an early Renaissance, the Reformation and the (proto) Industrial Revolution?