The causes of the upset were many. With the disaster of the Tet offensive in 1968, the Vietnam War had entered a peculiarly violent phase, and Lyndon Johnson had announced his withdrawal from politics. In China the Cultural Revolution was at its height. The ‘Prague spring’ had set Czech students in full opposition to their communist masters. Riots at universities had spread from Nanterre to engulf all of France, and the army had to be called out to suppress them. Students had been shot dead in Mexico. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Columbia University in New York had been shut by protests. There were riots outside the London School of Economics.
And in the spring of that year the students in Cambridge also rebelled in solidarity. For a brief while this most genteel and affable of cities became the scene of sit-ins and marches, bottle throwings and arrests, littering and shouting and scuffles. This was no Kent State; but the cascade of events was serious enough to prompt an official enquiry, and to some degree it tested Needham’s mastership.
It did so only to some degree because, we should remember, the Master was very much a committed socialist – even a communist, though still never a formal party member – and so was in general ideological agreement with the political aims of the students around the world, including those who were camped outside the back door at Caius. One student recalled that during a peaceful sit-down a window in the Master’s lodgings was briefly opened a crack, and a weathered hand emerged holding a folded piece of paper. The student took it and the hand withdrew.
‘I wish you to know,’ said a note written in ink in an impeccable hand, ‘that I support entirely all the reforms for which you are demonstrating today.’ It was signed: Joseph Needham. His had been the window, his the hand.
His leftist views were in no way dimmed by his prestigious position – though in many ways he was a great traditionalist, and he restored all manner of ceremonials and feasts to the Caius calendar. He wrote an elegant essay for the college chaplains on the numerous figures who, through the seven centuries of its existence, had given money or help to keep the institution going: he directed that the anniversary of each chaplain’s death (when it was known; he guessed the date when it was not) be memorialized in the chapel and celebrated by an oration followed by a black-tie dinner in Hall. Needham liked to eat, to dress up, to drink, to give cocktail parties, and to smoke cigars;52 a Cambridge college is the perfect place to indulge such habits, and the death of an ancient benefactor the perfect excuse for doing so; even the most restrained of fellows thought it would be churlish to complain.
He was not able, however, to persuade the college governing body to admit women, either as fellows or as undergraduate students, during the ten years he held office.
His traditionalism occasionally spilled over into areas where one might have supposed he would be a flaming liberal. For example, he forbade the installation of a condom-dispensing machine in one of the Caius lavatories. Considering his own fondness for erotic amusement, this might seem to verge on hypocrisy; he justified it by explaining that, while he favoured the free association of the young, he thought that having condom dispensers installed in college would encourage ‘instant sex’, and of that he was not in favour. Far better that students who wanted sex take time to walk to the chemists in town to buy their supplies, and think about the implications while they did so. This was a curious lapse in his understanding of human behaviour – perhaps a wilful one.
He was by no means a killjoy, however. He was an exuberant man, given to partying, to spontaneous public singing – he would have adored karaoke, a friend remarked – and he danced wildly, if not well. The cultural anthropologist Francesca Bray, who would later write, more or less entirely, the volume on agriculture, has already been quoted: ‘You’d better watch your toes if/You dance with Joseph.’
Since 1963 he had also been giving regular sermons from the pulpit of his favourite old church, in Thaxted. The memorably turbulent priest Conrad Noel had long gone, though Noel’s son-in-law Jack Putterill remained vicar until his death in 1973, and the radical, tolerant approach to Christianity that had so attracted Needham after his undergraduate years was still very much in evidence. He spoke on some forty occasions – ringing declarations, all well attended, on such topics as ‘Political Prisoners and Torture’, ‘Christianity and Marxism’, ‘Jealousy’, and ‘Robots and Unemployment’. He became embroiled in a brief controversy in 1976 when the Reverend Peter Elers, who was then the vicar, declared himself gay, and had to endure a torrent of criticism. Needham came swiftly to his side:
I have felt for many years that there is a great necessity today for a thorough reformation and modernization of the traditional theology of human sexuality. We are no longer living in patristic times, or the Middle Ages, and the new knowledge of itself which mankind has acquired since the Renaissance is something which the church must absorb in order to be able to exert the full force of its eternal message.
The present movement for tolerance and acceptance of wide variations in human relationships is only another part of the same general struggle for socialism and against oppression, in which Thaxted has been in the forefront for half a century.
Soon thereafter, and to hammer the point home, he made certain that he gave a rousing sermon at the memorial service for a celebrated homosexual member of Parliament, Tom Driberg, so that there should be no doubt as to his very public tolerance. He gave his last sermon a little more than a decade later, on the fourth Sunday after Trinity, in the summer of 1987: his theme then was ‘Greed and Capitalism’. Politically, nothing had changed.
He still travelled, though his joints were beginning to creak. After a pause following the Korean War – in the mid-1950s he had felt that further trips to China would make his situation at home intolerable – he started going to China again. He was now one of the founding leaders of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), which he, the Bryans, and others had formed after their BritainChina Friendship Association collapsed in a welter of Stalinist recrimination. In the late 1960s a visa obtained through SACU was just about the only way for a Briton to gain access to China; the young filmmaker David Attenborough was one of the first to do so. Needham remained its president for thirty-five years, and was able to get visas to China with ease – so long, his later critics pointed out, as he remained staunchly uncritical of the regime’s excesses.
He flew back to China first in 1964, and found to his delight that he was to be greeted officially by the government, and by no less than Zhou Enlai, who treated him like an old friend. The economic privations of the time were very obvious to Needham – the after-effects of the Great Leap Forward were painfully evident, though he assumed they were little more than the teething troubles of the new regime, and he returned to Cambridge with his faith unshaken.
But in 1972 he went back again – and to a raw and very deeply altered China, just emerging from the incredible suffering of the Cultural Revolution. This time he was not so sure. He found himself deeply depressed because so few of his old friends were available for him; he was puzzled that some seemed to have disappeared altogether, often in unexplained and occasionally sinister-seeming circumstances. His guides in China that year were neither so helpful nor so friendly as before, and his freedom to travel was quite severely restricted. He was puzzled, almost hurt.
His abiding love for the essence of China and its people remained intact, as it would for the rest of his life. But in the aftermath of what had so evidently altered the face and feeling of China now, he began for the first time to question the wisdom of the policies. He wondered, at first in silence and then in a series of essays, if Mao’s kind of socialism really was the answer – and he speculated in print as to whether some of the errors, if errors there were, might not have done terrible damage to the science for which China had so long been famous. One article in Nature in 1978, in which he called Mao’s policies towards science ‘disastrous’, attracted considerable attention: he seemed almost to be on th
e verge of breaking ranks – except that Mao had died two years before, making such criticism easier to express. Needham also issued a scathing public denunciation of the Gang of Four – the architects of the Cultural Revolution – but only after their fall, and after the new leadership in Beijing had condemned them. Criticism in Britain made him reply, weakly, that he was no China watcher, merely a historian of Chinese science.
Both Needham, at sixty-four; and Zhou Enlai, at sixty-six, were well on in middle age when they met again in Beijing in 1964, shortly before the outbreak of China’s Cultural Revolution, of which Needham was a moderately enthusiastic supporter.
Mao and his acolytes had done their best to keep such a formidable ally on their side. During the journey he made to China in 1972 the leaders were entirely unaware of his seeming unease, and they behaved in an exceptionally good-natured way to the man they regarded as one of their most vocal British supporters. It was Mao’s last opportunity to be so friendly. One story from that visit (a story one would prefer not to think apocryphal, though it cannot be confirmed) perhaps sums up the relationship that had grown up between Needham and Mao in the quarter century since they had first become aware of each other in Chongqing.
Needham was apparently invited, at very short notice, to come to Mao’s office on an ‘urgent matter of state business’. He dressed quickly, in a suit, and hurried along Chang’an Avenue to Zhongnanhai, the complex of lakeside palaces beside the Forbidden City where the Chinese leaders have their headquarters. Guards escorted him to Mao’s offices, where he found the chairman sitting in a relaxed mood, drinking tea.
They exchanged pleasantries for a few moments. Then Mao got down to business. He spoke in slow and heavily accented Chinese, which Needham could barely understand. He was aware, said Mao, that Yue-se, in his early years at Cambridge – Mao used Needham’s Chinese name, Li Yue-se – had driven a fast car, a sports car called, Mao astonishingly remembered being told, an Armstrong Siddeley. The perplexed Needham nodded his head. Yes, he had. He had loved cars, and still did.53
‘I thought so,’ said Mao. ‘You are the only westerner I know well enough, and who knows about motor cars. So I have come to you, Yue-se, to ask for a small piece of advice on an important matter of state business.’
Needham straightened his back, waiting.
‘I am aware of developments in the outside world. I have to decide whether to permit my people’ – Mao gestured expansively – ‘whether to allow my people to drive motor cars, or whether the bicycle is better for them. What, my dear Li Yue-se, do you think?’
Needham, amazed, paused. He thought for a moment – of the thousands of bicycles moving along Chang’an Avenue like a ceaseless sea, just a few yards away. He thought of the uncomplaining discipline of the riders, of the near-silence of the onrush of people, of the occasional flash of elegance as a beautiful young woman would glide past on her Flying Pigeon, swanlike and lovely. He was transported. He was in a reverie.
Mao coughed. His visitor snapped back into reality. He was in the office of the chairman of the Communist Party of China, the guiding light, the Great Helmsman of the mightiest nation on earth. He had been asked a question. A reply was needed.
‘Well, Mr Chairman,’ responded Needham, stuttering slightly. ‘To be honest with you, I find that back in Cambridge where I live, my very old bicycle is perfectly satisfactory for almost all of my needs.’
He was going to say more, to add that perhaps in a major industrial nation it might indeed be better to use cars, and it might be beneficial to allow private citizens to drive. But Mao was grinning. He had heard what he wanted to hear. A decision was in the making.
‘So, Yue-se, you who like China so much find the bicycle perfectly satisfactory?’ He rubbed his hands together, then spread them apart. He had made up his mind.
‘Right, then. Bicycles it is!’
And with that Needham was invited to leave, and he emerged blinking into the sunset onto an avenue that was jammed solid with the two-wheeled conveyances of the evening traffic jam. He suddenly felt he had made some contribution, in some strange way, to the future of all of these people – at least for the next few years.
No record of the conversation in Zhongnanhai exists. Maybe it never took place. But two things are certain. Joseph Needham did occasionally ride a bicycle. And China is now well on the way to becoming the world’s greatest producer – and soon the world’s greatest consumer – of automobiles.
Whatever Mao said or did not say to Joseph Needham on that summer’s day in 1972, he was dead four years later, and his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was to be bent single-mindedly on bringing China into the forefront of the modern world. And if that meant, as far as transportation was concerned, the wholesale scrapping of millions of Flying Pigeons and a nation shackled to a lifetime of pollution and traffic jams and countless miles of new roads to be built, then so be it.
Throughout this time there was a cascade of honours. In 1971 Needham was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy, so that now, in common only with the philosopher Karl Popper and the historian Margaret Gowing, he was a fellow of both the Academy and the Royal Society. Honorary degrees, academe’s device for publicly declaring the gratitude of the intellectual community, began to be offered: Cambridge got in early, and then Brussels, Norwich, Uppsala, Toronto, Salford, the two main universities in Hong Kong, Newcastle, Chicago (the US government finally giving him a visa to permit him to receive it), Hull, Wilmington (North Carolina), Surrey, and Peradeniya University (outside Kandy, in the central tea-estate hills of Sri Lanka). (The last reflected his keen interest in what was then Ceylon, when he chaired the country’s University Policy Commission in 1958.)
There was an oddly chilling coda to Needham’s brief visit to Chicago in the spring of 1978 He had been invited to give three public lectures at Northwestern University. For his second talk he decided on the topic ‘Gunpowder: Its Origins and Uses’. One of those who came to hear his lecture was a wild-haired loner of a mathematician, a tragic, brilliant man named Ted Kaczynski.
A short while earlier, professors at a Chicago branch of the University of Illinois had summarily rejected a brief essay Kaczynski had written on the evils of modern society, and one mathematician there had heard him mutter, bitterly, that he would eventually ‘get even’ with those who had spurned him. On 24 May, six weeks after sitting through Needham’s lecture, Kaczynski fashioned a wooden-cased explosive device made of gunpowder and match heads, and posted it to one of the professors who had rejected him. It was intercepted, exploded, and injured a campus security guard.
There were no clues as to who was the perpetrator of the crime, and the incident marked the beginning of an extraordinary, bizarre, and frightening period in modern American history. Over the next two decades Ted Kaczynski, who lived alone in a remote shack in the mountains of Montana, went on to send waves of carefully made and ever more lethal bombs to academics, killing three people and injuring more than twenty. The press and the FBI called him the Unabomber. He remained at large until his arrest in April 1996.
Few knew at the time that he may have initially been schooled in his deadly craft, though entirely unwittingly, by Joseph Needham. One can only wonder what would have happened – or might not have happened – had the State Department’s ban on Needham remained in place, denying the Unabomber the opportunity to hear him and to learn about early Chinese techniques for the manufacture of explosives.
In addition to Needham’s collection of degrees there were medals galore, to join China’s Order of the Brilliant Star – which the British government still prohibited him from wearing at official functions. There were memberships and fellowships in bodies and institutes and academies from India to Denmark and China and then finally, once the State Department had relaxed its ban on his entry in 1978, from the great American organizations: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Historical Association, and the Yale Chapter of Sigma Xi.
His roving eye remained undimmed, e
ven as he aged. There was much alarm in the mid-1970s when he became captivated by a distinguished Canadian-Chinese woman, H. Y. Shih, who was a former director of the National Gallery of Canada. There was even talk of a divorce, and a marriage. Under great pressure from all his friends – including a joint attack from both Dorothy and Gwei-djen, who acted in what old Chinese families would recognize as the ‘concert of the concubinage’ – the affair eventually fizzled, to widespread relief.
And through it all, the book. During the ten years of his mastership four more volumes were published – one on mechanical engin eering; two on chemistry; and in 1975 the mighty 400,000-word tome that is generally reckoned the finest and most comprehensive, the famous Volume IV, Part 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics. Seven volumes were now out on the shelves; ten more were in the process of being written, edited, and proofread; another ten were still in Needham’s overfurnished but impeccably organized mind.
And the chorus of admiration for the works was becoming ever more enthusiastic. George Steiner, the critic and public intellectual whose imprimatur was at the time perhaps more sought after than any other, remarked that in Science and Civilisation in China Needham had re-created a world of extraordinary density and presence:
He is literally re-creating, recomposing an ancient China, a China forgotten in some degree by Chinese scholars themselves and all but ignored by the west. The alchemists and metal-workers, the surveyors and court astronomers, the mystics and military engineers of a lost world come to life, through an intensity of recapture, of empathic insight which is the attribute of a great historian, but even more of a great artist.
The books could be favourably compared, wrote Steiner in a review in 1973, with la recherche du temps perdu – for both ‘Proust and Needham have made of remembrance both an act of moral justice and of high art’.