I don't buy the "they stoped trying" bit for 'the Needham question'. It's silly and unsubstantiated.

For a better explanation read the last chapter of 'Guns Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond. The chapter, titled 'Yali's question', gives a much more plausible explanaiton based on Chinas relative isolation, political climate and overall geography.

Where does Jared Diamond's thesis (the central authority was challenged by exploration and decided to stomp on it) fit into the current sinologists theories?

What Morris teams did he dance on?

so why is half the world engaged in copying? for centuries the "nail that sticks up is hammered down" drove creativity out of the gene pool. it will come back - after a thousand years. check out asian music and art and dance and architecture. some is beautiful, true, but none is new.

I'm reminded of a contemporary of Needham's, the brilliant American Paul Linebarger who as a young man of 17, the son of missionaries in China, negotiated with the US government for funding for Jiang Jie-Shi (Chiang Kai Shek) and received it. He went on to work with OSS and Army planners in Chongqing in Sichuan Province during WW2 while Chongqing was the temporary capital in an attempt to escape Japanese bombers. He was a remarkable - and wonderfuly eccentric - China Scholar who went on to work for the CIA and develop the core of US military psychological warfare strategy. He also, incidentally, wrote some of the 20th century's best science fiction under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith. I was lucky enough to find a book about China of his with his name and signature penciled in the inside front cover from when he was a young man at Harvard.

He was a sickly man and sadly died at 53. If you enjoyed reading about Needham you'd likely enjoy looking into Linebarger as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Linebarger

Hi,

1) Have you read the current issue of National Geographic? It is devoted to the ecnomic progress in China as well as China's ecological destruction. It makes for interesting reading/viewing.

2) Maybe the same thing is happening in US science. My partner was at last year's AGU and was talking to a NSF funding agent. The funding agent mentioned he was being forced to choose between supporting one of two researchers. Both researchers have records that span years. The US scientific funding situation is looking very grim.

3) Here in Australia we are looking for hydrologists because we see the need for water resource planning. Despite what Camille Paglia has written we Aussies are having a slight break in a very serious draught. Parts of our largest river system, the Murray-Darling, have the acidity of battery acid because of draught related chemical reactions. During a recent recruiting drive the BOM got over 300 appications for 85 jobs. Most of those applications were from abroad. I wonder how many are from the US?

4) The state of science education in China? So far I'm not impressed. I'm sure that China has some excellent students, but so far the 3 students I have seen haven't been exactly great. Maybe my expectations were too high, but if I were a Chineese taxpayer and I saw these 3 in operation I would feel the program they had participated in was a boondoggle. This is tragic because 21st century China is going to need top notch scientific leadership, and in my small, unscientific sample their educational resources are being wasted. I am speaking from the point of view of an observer of a Uni that has an active, ongoing student exchange program with a Chineese University.

alpha ralpha boulevard. his daughter is selling his books at http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/
by the way, he modelled his animal slaves (not all were so sexy as C'Mell) on the chinese peasants.
usxpat, norstrilia was modelled on guess who? (what else). by the way, your impression of the chinese students corresponds to what i've heard over here as well. really, the Big Deal is still CHEEEEEP Labor! (and stolen technology)

Thanks for this review, Andrew Leonard. I get the sense that you have a special affinity with Needham but are amused by his goals as well. Nobody can explain why China fell behind the, nobody can explain what a culture "did wrong". Whatever happened in history was too complex for us to even attempt to understand. And then there are those like David Sugarman who make sweeping statements about Asian music, art and architecture and declare that Asian culture has a "nail that sticks up is hammered down" phenomenon. Almost always, these are people who have minimal, if any, understanding of Asian culture. Brace yourself for the slew of racist and anti-Chinese comments that are going to surface.

and whether you noticed or not i said "ASIAN" not "CHINESE". Asia goes from Haifa to Haiphong. the chinese took the term over but i use it geographically. that means CHINA, INDIA, and all the moslem states. nothing from them. just copy.

If you read my post you will see that I did notice you said Asian, not Chinese. So what are you saying? That all other Asian countries copied everything from China? And how does copying preclude creativity?

24 volumes, 15,000 pages and 3 million words and still no answers as to why China stalled centuries ago?

I realize this may be naive but perhaps the success of European civilization is based simply on Western barbarism. Two centuries of savages pushing back at the powers that be may have fostered the independent thinking necessary to create artistic, scientific and religious masterworks.

The long term intellectual success of a nation requires free and independent ideas, something that would be in short supply in dynastic China.

Though it's easy to declare such a theory as being racist, that's not the right way to look at it. The way I see it is if China has stalled in anyway due to stifling regimentation imagine what may happen if the country eventually embraces independent thought.

it didn't copy china, it copied itself or the West, it came up with nothing new. look around you, what have they come up with that the world copied in the last thousand years? a science? an art? a political structure? a social interaction? do you think colonization answers for all of it? perhaps it does. if so, you are right and i am wrong and we will see nobel prize after nobel prize going to india and china and iran and the arab states. it's been a lifetime since decolonization and it hasn't happened yet. but if it does, i will have been proved wrong. i posited that it would take a thousand years of regeneing.