SCIENTIFIC AND TECHONOLOGICAL STAGNATION IN CHINA

The reasons for the Chinese scientific and technological stagnation are intellectual, philosophical and most importantly political and social.

Intellectually, the Chinese technical achievements lacked the essential elements of science, such as scientific explanations or mathematical proofs. Their mathematical concepts were algebraic, not geometric. Chinese mathematical thought was always deeply algebraic, not geometrical¹⁷³, and it is in this regard that it lacked the capacity to bring such transformation as witnessed in Galileo´s application of mathematical hypotheses to Nature.

Philosophically, the Chinese didn't have a mechanical view of the world. For them, every phenomenon was connected with everything else according to a hierarchical order (a perfect copy of their political system). Moreover, the Taoists distrusted reason and logic as well as precisely formulated abstract codified laws due to the tyranny of the politicians of the School of Legalism. Also, for them the cosmic order of things was inscrutable. Hence, Needham argued by quoting a letter written by Einstein to a friend, that

The development of Western Science has been based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility of finding out causal relationship by systematic experiment (at the Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.¹⁷⁴

Moreover, the most important reasons for the stagnation were political and social.

For Needham, there is a fundamental correlation between science and `democracy' (liberalism). In China, bureaucratic feudalism (in Marxist terms, the Asian production mode) controlled the whole country for more than 2000 years. It was a top-down power structure. Imperial power was exercised through an extremely elaborate civil service,

173Joseph Needham, Science in Traditional China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1981) p.10

174 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, aphorism 129; quoted in Needham, J., The Grand Titration:

Science and Society in East and West, p. 62

`the mandarinate'. ¨To become a mandarin, a man had to be an expert in the writings of Confucius and, for much of Chinese history (more than 1000 years) he had to pass very difficult examinations in these ancient writings.¨¹⁷⁵

All lords were swept away except one, the emperor, who ruled and collected taxes through a gigantic bureaucracy. This bureaucratic system prevented the rise of a merchant class. The powerful were opposed to free enterprise and destroyed regularly the merchants through excessive regulation and heavy taxation (with a cut for the mandarins). The only possibility for individual investment was land. All other economic sectors (iron and steel, salt) were nationalized for the well-being of one man, the despot.

Jared Diamond traced the problem of this bureaucratic system to the geographical situation of China.

In Guns, Germs and Steel¹⁷⁶, Jared Diamond, postulates that the lack of geographic barriers in much of China (essentially a wide plain with two large navigable rivers, and a relatively smooth coastline) led to a single government without competition. At the whim of a ruler who disliked new inventions, technology could be stifled for half a century or more. In contrast, Europe's barriers of the Pyrennes, the Alps, and the various defensible peninsulas (Denmark, Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, etc.) and islands (Britain, Ireland, Sicily, etc.) led to smaller countries in constant competition with each other. If a ruler chose to ignore a scientific advancement (especially a military or economic one), his more-advanced neighbours would soon usurp his throne. However, James Morris Blaut had criticized Diamond´s Guns, Germs, and Steel for reviving the theory of environmental determinism. He described Diamond as an example of a modern Eurocentric historian.¹⁷⁷ This kind of Eurocentric determinism is very visible in the Needham thesis which does not appear to have made an independent study of the Scientific Revolution. His views represent ´a highly selective precipitate of assorted portions of the literature on the subject´¹⁷⁸ which make the reader to wonder at times if his thesis is, really, about the ¨Scientific¨ rather than about the ¨Industrial¨ Revolution.

175John Marks, Science and the Making of the Modern World (Oxford: Heinemann, 1983) p. 224 176See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) Chap. 16

177James M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000) p. 228 178H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, p. 444

Needham’s rather romantic identification of Daoism with the Chinese scientific spirit is questionable, given Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu’s opposition to technological innovations.

In fact the exception that proves the rule, so to speak, for Needham’s thesis is the ancient Mohist School of Chinese philosophers. Their work focuses on optics and mechanics and has many features more resembling Western science than any other Chinese school. Their ethics which was a strange mixture of extreme utilitarianism and Christian-like universal love also had odd resemblances to Western philosophy. Mohists also developed logic, something that no other indigenous Chinese sect did. Their philosophy was only studied again after Buddhism spread in China.

The Mohists had no deductive geometry (though they might have developed one), and certainly no Galilean physics, but their statements often give a more modern impression than those of most of the Greeks. How it was that their school did not develop in later Chinese society is one of the great questions which only a sociology of science can answer.¹⁷⁹

The Mohists were craftspeople, military engineers, and Mo Tzu himself may have been a former slave and is very likely to have worked as a wheelwright. When the empire was consolidated around 200 BCE the independent role of the Mohist sects as military engineering consultants and defensive mercenaries to various small warring states was eliminated and Mohism disappeared, along with Chinese understanding of Mohist logic and science.

2.7.2.1 WHY SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION DID NOT HAPPEN IN CHINA

Needham emphasized that the triumph of the Scientific Revolution in the West was because of the other great events that characterized the European environment at that time. He strived to demonstrate that the Scientific Revolution is inextricably bound up with the Renaissance, Reformation, and the rise of Capitalism. These three events formed together the peak landmarks in the underlying process of the dissolution of feudalism and the rise of capitalism from the 15^th through the 18^th centuries. Therefore,

179Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West, p. 224

Needham concluded that, ¨To ask why modern science and technology developed in our society (Europe) and not in China is the same thing as to ask why capitalism did not arise in China, why was there no Renaissance, no Reformation, none of those epoch-making phenomena of that great transition period of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.¨¹⁸⁰ He later asserted that the more one knows about the Chinese civilization, the more odd it seems that modern science and technology did not develop there.

Perhaps, this is explained by the fact that Chinese science got along without dichotomies between mind and body, objective and subjective, even wave and particle.

In the West, the dichotomies between mind and body were entrenched in scientific thought by the time of Plato. Galileo, Descartes, and others carried them into modern times to mark off the realm of physical science from the province of the soul, and it formed the basis of liberty on which the secular innovators acted.

However one of the major questions Needham´s thesis failed to address was whether the merchants indeed began to get more closed off in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), at the same time that the scientific drive seemed to weaken? Or were there other factors at play? To confuse the issue further, in recent years a number of strong scholarly works have tracked many new examples of dynamic commercial and economic enterprise in the Qing period (circa 1644–1911), during China’s last dynasty, when China appeared to be dramatically “falling behind” in scientific energy. The debate is far from over.

Those who might want to pursue these questions further, whether to rethink them fundamentally or to tie them more firmly to Needham’s own magnum opus, will surely find no better point of entry than the recent review essay by Professor Nathan Sivin, a leading historian of Chinese science. Published in China Review International in 2005, Sivin’s essay focused on Needham’s Science and Civilisation: The Social Background, General Conclusions and Reflections wherein he gave a poignant and nuanced overview of Needham’s work as a whole.

Sivin is by no means convinced that “the Needham Question” needs asking anymore after so many years, for he feels—along with many other scholars—that “to explain what did not happen is about as rigorous as fiction.” Yet when he steps back and looks at all the contributions which have sought to give explanations for what happened to Chinese science, Sivin concludes that “Needham’s are the most thoughtful and the best

180 Ibid., p. 176

informed,” even if ultimately “none has reshaped our understanding.” If we seek certainties about the long hiatus within Chinese science, we are likely to be disappointed: “What did happen was the emergence of early modern science in Europe.

It is Europe that needs to be understood.”¹⁸¹Consequently, the theory of environmental determinism of the scientific revolution generated by the Needham thesis has led to various ´scholarly nationalist works´¹⁸² on theme, among which is Robert Merton´s Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth-Century England.

2.8 MERTON THESIS: PURITANISM AND THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE