The Man Who Loved China:  The Fantastic Story Of An Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked The Mysteries Of The Middle Kingdom, by Simon Winchester

If you are of the belief that Joseph Needham, the man at the center of this deeply intriguing, often entertaining, and just as frequently unfuriating book, is merely a harmless or admirable eccentric, you will likely enjoy this book.  When I read this book, though, I found Needham to be far less pleasant than the term eccentric would indicate, and found him indeed to be a very troubling figure.  Despite my general respect for the technological and cultural achievements of China, a country I nonetheless deeply distrust (on account of its rulers), I found the author to be one of those classic examples of leftist/progressive hypocrites that I have so little tolerance for in life or in reading about.  Despite being in an open marriage and flagrantly unfaithful to a devoted wife, he sought to prevent the students he was master of at one of Cambridge’s colleges from having easy access to condoms because while he could enjoy easy sex with women of easy virtue, he did not think everyone else should have that privilege.  Likewise, he was someone who loved his creature comforts but was simultaneously an avid leftist and even a communist dupe in Cold War geopolitics against the United States in the Korean War, an act for which he justly paid a heavy social price.

This book of nearly 300 pages is divided into seven fairly lengthy chapters and various supplementary material.  The book begins with maps and illustrations and an author’s note.  After this, the author talks about the meeting between Needham and a Chinese-born scholar who became his longtime mistress as well as his second wife (after his first wife died) and how it set Needham on a series of investigations about China and why it had stopped innovating (1).  After this the author discusses the arrival of Needham into China and the complex logistics this involved given the course of World War II (2).  After this comes a fascinating discussion of Needham’s various investigations into China as well as the discoveries he made in the course of those trips while avoiding being captured by the Japanese and dealing with rundown machinery (3).  After that the author explores Needham’s friendships with various figures, including Zhou Enlai, who would prove to be important (4), before spending some time on the very lengthy period of the author writing his masterpiece on Chinese science and technology as well as various work setting up UNESCO (5).  The book takes a solemn turn when the author examines Needham’s justly deserved fall from grace in Cold War politics (6) and in his slow decline into hypocrisy and decrepitude (7), and then there is an epilogue as well as some appendices that examine various matters of Chinese inventiveness (i) and dynastic rule (ii).

How the reader is going to feel about this book depends in large part on how the reader feels about the politics of Needham.  As someone who abhors the decadence of Needham’s personal life and just as deeply abhors his typically hypocritical socialist leanings (socialism for thee but not for me), there was not much I found about Needham that was likeable.  The author whines about how Needham’s efforts at helping the creation of a leftist global cultural elite was ensnared by Cold War politics, but it is not something worth celebrating or appreciating in general, so my sympathies are with the Cold warriors opposing dupes and stooges and enemies of humanity among the left and not with Needham and those associates of his who fell prey to the just suspicions and reasonable concerns of the United States and its allies.  Given these sympathies, I found the work to be of interest only to the extent that I appreciated the way that Needham uncovered the antiquity of Chinese developments, but just about everything else in this book is garbage.