Science in Traditional China

by Joseph Needham

Book Overview

The world's preeminent authority on Chinese science explores the philosophy, social structure, arts, crafts, and even military strategies that form our understanding of Chinese science, making... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674794397
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Learn the wisdom of China

Science in Traditional China : a comparative perspective, was a collection of lectures in 80s in Hong Kong. It is interesting to learn from this Chinese authority who composed a gigantic volume on Chinese Civilizations. He research and document the Chinese technology and inventions in contributing the welfare and wellbeing to the world and mankind. Many times, he came across the six million dollar question why modern science and Industrial Revolution did not happen in China. Dr. Needham was a British subject and he shifted the questioner to seek for the answer. China led the world in terms of technology and civilization for the past two thousand years, except British Empire smuggled opium to push to Chinese for trade deficit and waged two Opium Wars! Chinese silver helped grow the colonial and imperial British Empire with the flag never set. Where they got the capital to fund the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions? The infamous British pirate, Francis Drake who raided the Spanish treasure and contributed to British royal coffer. Queen Elizabeth knighted him for this privateer. British coffer was full of booties and loots. The great Geographic Discovery inherited what Chinese Ming Admiral Zhang He treasure boats legacy and spread capitalism globally. The winners always re-wrote history and put down Chinese inventions for the past five hundred years. China in past forty years made an impressive leap forward nationally, especially in One Belt One Road, Western powers which invaded and tried to cut up China like a melon in late 19th Century felt the threat, especially the sole hegemony. Reading this book help politicians open their eyes to understand Chinese history. Learning China is the beginning of wisdom! Highly recommend for all worldwide audience.

How come only the west developed science? Why not China?

This short book, with its many charming and fascinating illustrations from ancient China, will interest many. Needham gives the history of gunpowder and firearms and comparative macrobiotics. What really interested me, however, is the concluding essay, in which Needham speculates why science never developed in China. And it is a mystery, one that many scholars have pondered. China's civilization had thousands of years of stable government. And it has a tradition that venerated scholars. China also had a history of many interesting inventions and engineers. Certainly, all the factors seemed lined up to aid in the blossoming of scince. Yet science, not just mere technology, real science, with its organized effort to explain and understand nature, with its interest in abstract subjects and its testing of theories, only developed in the west. Why? Needham suggests it was the way the Chinese viewed time. Across the entire of the western ancient world, as well as India and China, time was viewed as a great wheel, with one golden age with great technologies succeeded by a fallen era, when idea would be lost. Then the golden age would reappear, with all the same technologies. What the west had was Christianity, which posited a time which was not a wheel, but which progressed. Christ, after all, came in historical time. Alfred North Whitehead placed the reason the west developed science on Christian theology. This is what he stated: "There seems but one source...It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God...Every detail was supervised and ordered; the search in to nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality". From the very start, as shown in such Christian theologians as Tertullian and Augustine, Christians argued that there was a truth. Truth was God. And the truth could be discovered by rationality.