Needham or not...

Dongguan had been almost relentlessly warm for the past few weeks but, since Saturday, we have suffered something of a change of fortune with a veritable deluge of rain hitting us accompanied by temperataures not far above freezing. Today I am sitting as deeply into Cochan Cafe as I can manage but, unfortunately, the local habit of leaving the main doors open to encourage customers means that the interior is, to put it mildly, chilly. At least this is one of the few cafes in Dongguan that actually does enforce the law of smoking, so one doesn’t have to deal with that particular unpleasantness as well. Obeying laws seems to be quite optional here in China, if the obeyance thereof is likely to cost the owner of the business a few customers then it is very unlikely to be enforced. In the case of smoking, the authorities made quite a song and dance about their new regulations last year, proclaiming to all and sundry how they wanted to promote healthier lifestyle habits here, but as ever here, presentation is one thing, enforcement quite another.
My mind has been somewhat occupied of late by the ‘Needham Question’, something that was brought to my attention a few weeks back by a friend of mine in Kanchanaburi. Joseph Needham, originally a biochemist, became both a sinologist and also something of a sinophile. His initial interest in China was sparked after embarking on an affair with a young Chinese scientist in Cambridge in the late 30s. She made him aware of some of the many remarkable discoveries and inventions of Chinese science up to the 18th century. China’s culture had been one of, if not the leading culture for several centuries. As Needham illustrated in his opus magnus on the subject many (the massive and unfinsihed 25 volume ‘Science and Civilisation in China’), many developments in science and mathematics had their genesis in China. Needham certainly had a point and he was by no means backwards in coming forward to make that point, writing and travelling endlessly in pursuit of his calling. Many other scholars felt that although there was much validity to what he said, he also developed the tendency to credit almost all major developments to China (much to the approval of his lover, no doubt). Basically, he over-egged it.
The Needham Problem essentially addresses the question of why this influence stopped and the culture essentially ossified (at least as far as scientific development was concerned) to the point where the younger but more energised cultures of Europe both overtook China and eventually left it far behind.
Many answers have been posited, some more credible than others. The stultifying effect of Confuscianism for example, wherein social stability is prized about all else. The nature of the Chinese state which laid great emphasis on continuity and had little need for innovation. The exam system for bureaucrats which held rote learning in high esteem but, again, did not particularly value original work. The remnants of the latter can still be seen in the Chinese education system of today. It is very good at turning out individuals who pass exams, but unfortunately not quite as good at creating pupils who actually understand their subjects. In regards to the latter, it is not an uncommon experience to come across people with degrees in English in China, who yet seem almost incapable of even the simplest of discussions using that language.

Another, somewhat more imaginative answer, is that regarding the development of glass in Europe. The theory runs that because the Europeans loved wine they developed glass to a much higher degree which eventually lead on to the development of optics, scientific instruments and, last but not least, spectacles. This latter innovation thus enabled a greatly increased creative lifespan for the European intellectual as opposed to their Chinese counterpart whose culture, favouring tea over wine, had merely developed porcelain. An interesting theory...

Interestingly, and rather oddly, after consulting 20 odd sites on the internet addressing this question, none of them seem to have posited the possibility of what would seem a very obvious contributing factor. The industrial revolution that started in the UK and spread throughout Europe created the need for a better educated workforce, at least to a basic level. To make this possible, a certain democratization of education was required in order to have sufficient people capable of working within the new paradigm. This increasing access to education created a much wider pool of potential scientists, mathematicians and engineers that had hitherto been the case.
This same process would not have been possible to the same extent in China due to one very simple but very fundamental factor: the cumbersome nature of the Chinese writing system. Mandarin Chinese is often described as a very difficult language to learn, perhaps even the most difficult. Personally, I think that spoken Chinese is no more challenging than any number of other languages, despite the difficulties connected to the use of tones. The grammatical structures within the language are of themselves far simpler than French, English or German. Many outsiders successfully manage to learn to speak the language but few, even after many years of study, get anywhere near close to being able to read, let alone write, in Mandarin.

Even Western academics who have studied the language for a decade will still have difficulties reading even the most basic novel or newspaper article in Chinese. There is no shame in this as the Chinese people themselves suffer under a similar yoke. Though the Chinese government claim a literacy rate of around 95% (interestingly similar to Western European countries and the US) this is only achieved by setting a standard that is so low as to be bordering on the absurd. Recognition of characters for example, is considered enough of a qualification even if the ability to recreate these characters is completely lacking. I have met several seemingly bright people here who are completely unable to read official documents and have to rely on friends to interpret for them.
Now, interestingly, if the results of IQ testing is to be believed, the average Chinese person is a tad more intelligent than his Western counterpart. Yet real literacy rates here in China are stubbornly low. I conducted some interesting experiments (highly unscientific, of course) myself of late just to see how difficult the written system was even for educated Chinese people. I worked with a couple of undergraduates, giving them a list of reasonably common words. Their immediate reaction was to pick up their mobile phones and enter the pinyin! When told that this was not allowed they looked just a tad flummoxed and, somewhat abashed, had to admit that they could not write the words from memory. One of the words used was ‘sneeze’. Now imagine in the West having people educated to undergraduate level who struggle with reproducing such a simple word; it would be simply unbelievable unless that person was unlucky enough to be severely dyslexic.
Another aspect of this historically is that in the times we are referring to the Chinese script was actually several orders of magnitude more difficult than it is today. Most of the scholars time was taken up by their attempts to simply master enough words to pass various administrative exams.
So, my contention is that the problem for China in regards to the Needham Paradox (it has many names!) was not so much in the culture or the underlying capabilities of the populace but simply due to the almost impossible task of democratizing education when the pupils are faced with such a gargantuan task as simply learning the written system in the first place.
Several years ago I took a trip to Russia. It was a relatively late booking so I had barely two and a half weeks to get a little Russian under my belt before I left. It took me roughly 36 hours to learn the phonetics of the cyrillic script and with it the ability to understand simple signs. More recently, a friend and I also decided to learn the Greek alphabet just for the hell of it. This process took a couple of days. Now, compare that to getting even a basic understanding of the Chinese written system...years, or even decades are required to reach a similar level.

This has proven to be quite a long piece and I am completing it in C Store, a cafe a few hundred metres from Cochan. As I look to my right I see a sign written in Chinese script, symbolically and in English. It says: no smoking. Beneath it, a young man of about twenty years of age, puffs away happily...