Book Review
The Man who Loved China
3/5 stars
"Sycophantic Overkill of a mildly dislikable character."
*******

The author of this book comes across as Needham's butt-boy: I can understand admiring someone's intellectual ability, but his praise is: fawning, over-the-top and effusive. "He was an extraordinarily well organized man.... The cards would be covered with details, in his almost perfect copperplate." (p.183).

For the record, this book is a combination of a biography of the not-exactly-likeable Joseph Needham and a discussion of many decades that he spent writing a book about the history of Chinese inventions. (Eventually, he brought in other authors because it was clear that the project would exceed his lifetime.)

In a lot of ways, this book is not honest/accurate.

Example 1:

(p. 45) "..... His stupefied admiration for the people who, for the last 3000 years, had made this ancient language the basis of their cultural continuum."

1. During this time, 90% of Chinese people could not even read, and that had been the case ever since the language was standardized 22 centuries ago by Qin Shi Huang.

2. The language was standardized right around the 2nd century BCE. About 800 years short of 3,000.

Example 2:

The author himself repeats the party line(s) that: "The language is essentially unaltered from its origins more than 3,000 years ago. (p.257)." And this myth has been repeated so many times that John de Francis wrote an entire book ("Chinese Language, Fact and Fantasy") just in order to debunk that misconception.

Example 3:

Simon Winchester talks on and on about how well received this book was, and how it is still in print......but:

1. As I look on Amazon, *all* 12 volumes of this work have fewer combined total Amazon reviews than even a modern book about China such as Jasper Becker's "The Chinese."

2. The prices on these volumes are extremely high. $50-450 per volume. Meanwhile any of the Ayn Rand books (any of which is probably longer than Needham's entire 12 volumes) are still in print and available for a dollar or two plus shipping.

Example 4:

The overwhelming majority of what Needham put in his volume had actually been written down much earlier in the Qing dynasty (at the behest of the long serving Kangxi), in a compilation that contains 10,000 volumes and 170 million characters.

*******

These are variations on a theme of stories that have been told MANY times before.

1. A Western/white man discovers Asian trim and becomes a fan of all things Chinese. (It was enough to keep me there for 11 years.)

It's also interesting that Rewi Alley (p.112) did the gay version of this thing - - which I have also seen: He was kept there because of his "eager interest in young Chinese men." (The story of Western guys interested in Asian Boyhole is usually told in Thailand; but statistically, there are enough people in China to tell it several more times.)

2. A Western Idiot Academic (who has NEVER held a Real Job / set foot in a factory), from the comfort of academia, falls in love with Abstract Socialism while millions of people die/starve to death from working with Concrete Socialism.

3. Limousine liberals are not new. Joseph Needham, (p.31) this "militant" did not want to give up his magnificent Armstrong-Siddeley car. And of course he could never do anything related to active boots-on-the-ground, because he had a teaching "job" (p. 33) at which he didn't actually teach for decades.

4. A man looking for something to do (especially one who cannot sire children) is one who could be expected to flit from one crusade to another during his life. First it was Christianity. Then, at some point it became Nudism. (I think this was after he spent a couple of years training to be a priest.) Then after that it became Socialism. Then after that it went back to Christianity plus an open marriage. Then on to Asian muff. (This is all before page 50, by the way. This was the story of Sydney Shapiro in "I Chose China" and similar to Robin Wiszowaty in "My Maasai Life.")

And but a short step to full blown Sino-fetishization/ Yellow Fever.

5. The Idiotic Academic as Useful Idiot. Needham believed fabricated Chinese evidence about biological warfare in the same way that the Rosenbergs believed whatever they did they got them executed. Or that you might never know that any leftist regime is as it is if you listen to Noam Chomsky.

6. Tomorrow is not promised, and neither winners nor losers are guaranteed to remain in that position. The Persians and the Arabs had their moment in the sun. Then later on, Europe was important for a moment. The United States might have a century.

It's not hard to imagine that China might occupy both positions several times over a long enough history.

******
There are lots of comments about the technical sophistication of the Chinese over the centuries, but there are more than a few problems:

1. If people live in someplace (particularly cities) for a long time, then inventing things is a matter of course. And that is a natural result of trading and learning to specialize. So, a lot of things that Chinese people invented --when held up against the fact that they were in one place for a LONG TIME-- they seem to be a lot less impressive.

It's just as noteworthy the things that they DIDN'T invent, and are only learning to use very recently - - within the past half century, as a matter of fact. And still with much difficulty in some cases. (Research institutions. Monetary policy. Corporate governance tools. A consistent and impartial legal system. An independent judiciary. And on and on.)

All of these things exist throughout Western Europe and North America (with varying degrees of success), and these countries have much shorter histories than China. (For instance, the whole span of the United States is shorter than either the Tang or the Qing dynasties.)

How did they not invent these things when they had a head start of thousands of years? (This is actually "The Needham Question" on page 157.) Now that these things *do* exist, why are they finding it so difficult to master them? (Even as I write this review, they're in the midst of a real estate crisis, the likes of which was seen before just a few decades ago in Japan. And yet: they still have not figured out how to mark down / mark to market abandoned buildings.)

2. There were continual famines (1,861, by the count of Jasper Becker) all the way from the time of the First Emperor up until the last one that finished in 1961. (That one was a real doozy, with around 30 million people dead in 4 years. As if September 11th happened every single day for 29 years.)

3. The Western technology that Japan used to attack China had actually been offered to China almost a century before. (During Lord MacCartney's visit there, he was scornfully rebuffed, and by that time the West had vastly surpassed the technology available in the Middle Kingdom.)

4. Unable to produce enough women so that every man who wants one can have a wife. And this is the simplest technology that there is, because all animals like to copulate and if you just leave things alone then there will be an equal number of boys and girls born.

Shortage of women has led to several collapses throughout the very long Chinese history, and yet none of them were teachable moments.

******
What is valuable is:

1. The book's alternate take on the Sino-Japanese war: Some sources have portrayed Chiang kai-shek as a collaborator with the Japanese; other sources have portrayed him as being so occupied with fighting the Japanese that he lost control of the country to the Communists.

This book seems to assert that he deliberately held back from fighting in order to "let the sheer size of China wear the (Japanese) invaders down" (p. 78).

2. The mechanism of transfer of Buddhism from India to China. (Apparently, there were some very determined monks -- men of words-- at the beginning of the first millennium who did the leg work and eventually brought it to the Chinese court. Once they had impressed the rulers, the population was a small matter.)

3. Being made aware that Needham was one of the founding members of UNESCO, which came into existence shortly after the end of World War II.

Verdict:

I love Simon Winchester (it was his book on measurement and engineering, "The Perfectionists," that made me give this book a chance), but ultimately I don't recommend this book.

Vocabulary:

claret
nave
consistory court
Morris dancing
fustian
baldric
Armstrong-Siddeley
mite
Cornford-McLaurin fund
rangy
invigilation
vade mecum
strafe(d)
clerihew
scrofulous
hugger-mugger
fetch up (somewhere)
noviciate
trachoma squad
Maginot line
machair
cwm (no, that's not a misspelling)
doughty
Aurel Stein (£220 for artifacts)
rattan
salient (in geographic sense)
Cochin-China (a part of Vietnam/Indochina)
Needham Question (p.157)
million(ed windows)
gillyflowers
Syndics
fascicle
cheroot
trencherman
Stakhanovite
Copperplate script
rotary ballista
sternpost rudder
ataraxy
scapulamancy
oneiromancy
Glyphomancy
mise-en-scène
fen(s)
consilium
ostracod
punnet
non compos mentis
Jarndyce v Jarndyce
waspish

Quote: "No knowledge is ever to be wasted, or ever to be despised."