Needham wanted to know why Chinese scientific innovation had ground to a halt in the 16th century, just when European science was taking off. As Winchester says, the Cambridge don “never fully worked out the answers.” Nevertheless, he was convinced that the solution to China’s problems was communism. He befriended Zhou Enlai (周恩來), number two to Mao Zedong (毛澤東), and managed, like many other intellectuals, to excuse or ignore the brutality and totalitarianism of communist rule.
In this field, he had form. He visited Moscow in 1935 and returned “powerfully reinforced” by the experience. This willingness to believe the best of the worst would almost destroy his professional standing. In 1952, Needham joined an international commission set up by the Chinese government to investigate reports that the Americans had used biological weapons in the Korean War. Led by the nose by Chinese agents, who mocked up sites and faked results, Needham declared the US guilty as charged.
In this conclusion, he was almost certainly wrong. As Winchester writes: “Needham was intellectually in love with communism and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him.” For a while, it looked as if he might lose his position at Cambridge. But the controversy passed and he went on to be elected master of Gonville and Caius College.
Needham was sympathetic to the student rebellions of 1968. During one sit-in, he sent a note to protesters: “I wish you to know that I support entirely all the reforms for which you are demonstrating today.” And in spite of his long-standing defense of Chinese academics, he was also an advocate of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which terrorized academia.
All the same, by the time of his death in 1995, Needham’s ideological beliefs were comprehensively overshadowed by his intellectual achievements. Chief of these are the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge and the enormous, perspective-altering endeavor that is Science and Civilisation in China. Such testaments speak for themselves, but what’s left to say is said with great verve and style by Winchester in this biography.
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