This is a collection of essays by Joseph Needham about science in China and the West. The nominal question to be answered is "why, given that in ye olde dayes, China was like ZOMG much more tech than the West, how come it didn't invent modern science?". But in practice much more space is given to convincing us that ZOMG those antient chinks were well up there maaan.Oh dear, am I revealing my prejudices?
There's a pretty scathing review in Science from 1970 which says quite a bit of what I wanted to say, but perhaps more authoritatively.
Before I get into lengthy quotations, let me say a bit about how badly he establishes his core concern, which is (I am paraphrasing, I hope you understand) that "everything" in the West was really invented in China. His method of doing this is to notice that the Chinese had, say, clocks, quite early on; that the West had better clocks later, and then to say or imply or infer that Western clock tech comes from China. But what he never does is prove any transmission; or really make any effort to demonstrate.
There's another issue, which is that in most cases he is talking more about tech than science. Bureaucracy isn't greatly threatened by tech; people making better ink or an improved lock-gate aren't a threat; it's the people wondering about the stars who need to be controlled.
Let's quote some of JN:
So we come to the fundamental question, why did modern science not arise in China? The key probably lies in the four factors: geographical, hydrological, social and economic. All explanations in terms of the dominance of Confucian philosophy, for instance, may be ruled out at the start, for they only invite the further question, why was Chinese civilization such that Confucian philosophy did dominate. Economic historians such as Wu Ta-Khun, Chi Chhao-Ting and Wittfogel, tell us that though Chinese and European feudalism were not unlike, when feudalism decayed in China, it gave place to an economic and social system totally different from anything in Europe: not mercantile, still less industrial, capitalism, but a special form which may be called Asiatic bureaucratism, or bureaucratic feudalism. As we have already seen above, the rise of the merchant class to power, with their slogan of democracy, was the indispensable accompaniment and sine qua non of the rise of modern science in the west. But in China the scholar-gentry and their bureaucratic feudal system always effectively prevented the rise to power or seizure of the State by the merchant class, as happened elsewhere.
So his answer is the China got bureaucracy, Europe got merchantile democracy. Or said another way:
This is the background, then, which alone enables us to say that there was no modern science in China because there was no democracy. Democracy of a sort there was, in so far as (in many dynasties at any rate) it was possible for a boy of whatever origin to become a great scholar (the village neighbours might club together to provide a tutor for him) and so take a high place in the official bureaucracy. Democratic, too, was the absence of hereditary positions of lordship, and democratic was, and still is, the psychological attitude of the commons within whom the four 'classes' (scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants) interchanged with considerable fluidity among one another. It explains the utter lack of the servility so noticeable in other peoples of the eastern hemisphere. But that particular sort of democracy associated with the rise of the merchants to power, that revolutionary democracy associated with the consciousness of technological change, that Christian, individualistic and representative democracy with all its agitating activity, which characterized the New Model Army, the Army of the Marseillaise, the Minute Men, the Floating Republic, the Dorset Martyrs, the Communards, the Sailors of Invergordon and Kronstadt, and the Motor-Cycle Battalions which took the Winter Palace that China never knew until our own day.
(note we can tell from this that democracy is a good thing, because JN feels obliged to pretend that China had it). But note that he is uneasy in his explanation: is it democracy, is it merchants? And why are all of his "applications" military? More on the Chinese system:
There is probably no other culture in the world where the conception of the civil service has become so deeply rooted. I myself had no idea of it when I first went to China, but you can find it everywhere there, even in the folk-lore. Instead of stories about heroes and heroines becoming kings or princesses, as in Europe, in China it is always a matter of taking a high place in the examina-tions and rising in the bureaucracy, or marrying an important official. This was, of course, the only way in which to acquire wealth. There is a famous saying (current till recently) that in order to accumulate wealth you must enter the civil service and rise to high rank (Ta kuan fa tshai). The accumulation of wealth by the bureaucracy was the basis of the phenomenon often described by Western people in China as 'graft', 'squeeze', and so on, and of which so many complained. The attitude of Westerners, however, has been prejudiced by the fact that in Europe religion and moral uprightness had a historical connection with that quantitative book-keeping and capitalism which had no counter-part in China. At no time in Chinese history were the members of the mandarinate paid a proper salary, as we should think natural in the West. There were constant efforts to do so, decrees were always being issued, but in point of fact it was never done, and the reason is probably because the Chinese never had a full money economy.
It really doesn't take much to realise that a society where the highest ambition is to be an arts-side bureaucrat isn't going to get scientific flourishing. And
There cannot be much doubt (as we can now see) that the failure of the rise of the merchant class to power in the State lies at the basis of the inhibition of the rise of modern science in Chinese society. What the exact connection was between early modern science and the merchants is of course a point not yet fully elucidated. Not all the sciences seem to have the same direct con-nection with mercantile activity. For instance, astronomy had been brought to quite a high level in China. It was an orthodox' science there because the regulation of the calendar was a matter of intense interest to the ruling authority. From ancient times the acceptance of the calendar promulgated by the Emperor had been a symbol of submission to him. On account of a great sensitivity to the 'prognosticatory' aspect of natural phenomena, the Chinese had amassed long series of observations on things which had not been studied at all in the West, for example auroras. Records of sun-spots had been kept by the Chinese, who must have observed them through thin slices of jade or some similar translucent material, long before their very existence was suspected in the West. It was the same with eclipses, which were supposed to have a fortunate or antagonistic effect on dynastic events. Then there were the 'unorthodox' sciences, for example alchemy and chemistry, which were always associated with Tao-ism. Neither astronomy nor chemistry could enter the modern phase, however, in the Chinese environment.
You can't trust him on the details, of course. He asserts that "astronomy had been brought to quite a high level in China" but what he means is observations. Their theory was utterly deficient; they weren't even interested enough to ask.
And that's a good place to segue into a congruent but distinct view, which I get from Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: that the Key Insight, which the antient Greeks provided, was criticism. The idea that you created theories of how the world was, but others were allowed to criticise and scutinise, and propose better. You see immeadiately that kind of attitude fits well with merchantile democracy, and very poorly with bureaucracy of any stripe.
In a way, we're back to the similar "why poverty?" question. The answer is "you don't need to explain poverty; it is the natural state". Similarly "why ignorance?". And so "why no science?" gets the same answer: that's the default. You have to be special to get science.
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