Hon. Chinaman
DENNIS J. DUNCANSON
The Master of Caius is a biochemist. Years ago, working alongside colleagues from China, he marvelled at their qualities, while what they told him about the civilisation of their homeland showed up the falseness of Western pretensions to cultural superiority. Thus, his feet were set on the road to dis- covery of old China. The Second World War took him out to serve modern China as a volunteer; the sympathy he then devel- oped for the cause of the Chinese Commurr- ist party has been repaid, since the party came to power, by invitations to tour far and wide.
Almost no other don in this country has such thick Chinese mud on his boots, so to speak, as Joseph Needham has; his erudi- tion can never fail to command an instant hearing. It is enshrined in the seven volunteS of Science and Civilisation in China—that wonderful encyclopaedia in which he and half a dozen collaborators have chronicled the scientific and technical achievements of the Chinese before the impact of modern knowledge from the West. Within the Four Seas draws out the lessons of the greater work, though without the documents.
It is a miscellany of 'garnered sheaves', most of which have seen the light before— from articles and reviews in periodicals, through a long popular ballad and the author's own rhymed panegyric of Mao Tse- tung, to a college sermon and a ceremonial prayer. The same message is reasserted, in different terms, in each of the pieces: that the Chinese were scientifically and technic- ally more advanced than Europeans from 200 BC to AD 1400, and also more humane and spiritually cultured, so that the Western monopoly of Christianity was not sufficient to redeem the arrogance and the barbarisM of our irruption, with superior weapons, into the Chinese world. (Dr Needham could, have quoted Emperor K'ang Hsi's charming question to the Jesuit Fr Verziest in the 1670s: why was it the Saviour chose to be born in the West since much more of man- kind lived in China?) China's failure f/l' develop modern science when Europe did is explained by social rigidity, a price she paid for the political stability of her bureaucratic system of government, and was not in any way to her discredit.
But surely these things have long been recognised in the west? We know the Chin- ese were printing books 500 years before Gutenberg — what we do not know is whether Gutenberg ever saw a sample; and even in China, books were an afterthought' from printing patterned silk, whose lack was an accident not to our discredit either. (Anyway, did the Chinese invent movable hypes?—some authorities say it was the Koreans, who had a stronger language in- centive.) Full credit to the Chinese if they did invent a seismograph, 1,800 years ago,. so accurate that they used it to determine in which direction to dispatch relief for the
victims; but credulity boggles, for more than the technique ,sounds anachronistic.
So too over China's humanity. Dr Need- ham must have seen bound feet, if not heard the anguish while it was being done. Mercantile arrogance, buccaneers, indemni- ties, 'unequal treaties'? Europeans did not invent the trading system of the Eastern seas—they usurped the role in it of the Chinese Empire. A Chinese rule of law different from ours, but equally humane? Well, its practice included vicarious punish- ment, and still does. Chinese torture a calumny? What epithet does then fit the bastinado and the 'slow death' (mercifully by slicing the flesh, cruelly by plucking it with pincers)? . . . Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih, and other reformers lamented that China's social values lagged behind Eur- ope's, not merely her technology; the con- clusion of most of us is that 'all within the four seas' truly are brothers, each as un- qualified as the other to throw the first stone.
One cannot leave it there, however, be- cause Dr Needham doesn't. The Confucian past lives on, he says, in the people's pre- sent; the mass labour that dug the earth reservoirs ten years ago reflected the tradi- tional capacity of the Chinese people for hydraulic co-operation: the collectives and the 'communes' (he dislikes that word, but is it not Mao's own?) are more in charac- ter than the individualism foreigners have wrongly thought they saw in China because it justified their vested interest in promoting capitalist production. The real issue, of course, is the Chinese liking for free mar- keting, complained of by the party. But Chinese social historians writing outside China still confirm the traditional element in what today is called party leadership— albeit a tradition closer to coercion than to the spontaneous enthusiasm Dr Needham believed surrounded him on his inspections; and Chairman Mao being photographed shovel in hand owes more to Western-style publicity than to the magic behind the Emperor's symbolic ploughing to which Dr Needham relates it.
There was also another echo from the past in that year of the Great Leap For- ward—a campaign slogan Dr Needham seems to have forgotten. Communist film studios distributed among overseas Chinese communities monthly documentaries pur- porting to illustrate the inventiveness of Chinese workers under party leadership, from backyard steel furnaces to 'labour- saving techniques' such as moving earth horizontally by first carrying it up ladders in baskets and then letting it roll down a chute. The pathetic fallacies in these films —or else the studied humbug—sullied new China's image among Chinese audiences abroad and at the same time prompted con- jecture whether the true Chinese tradition may be one of gadgetry rather than tech- nology.
Despite a few rather silly lapses (the iron curtain is mythical; new China is not marx- ist; the Americans napalmed North Korea in order to introduce capitalism there— though happily no 'germ warfare in leaflet canisters'!), there is a feast of believe-it- or-not titbits in Within the Four Seas, and much stimulating comment. But in the main it is personal nostalgia for an ideal China that nearly was if not quite—might have been perhaps but for the great proletarian cultural revolution (like people's war, un- mentioned). It is an invitation, comparable to that of the French Encyclopaedists 200 years ago (honourably mentioned), to a new chinoiserie.
Previous page
