I am delighted and honoured to be invited by students of CAH4536 Advanced Management for Cultural Professionals and CAH3546 Festival and Cultural Events Management to write a message for the online exhibition “Re-discovering Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China”. We understand that this exhibition, like many other activities held on campus and in the town, has to go virtual in response to the virus outbreak. Across different countries people are having a hard time tackling the challenges brought by the virus. We are the lucky few who have the privilege of using university (and hence public) resources to carry on with our studies.

In the 1940s Joseph Needham was also having a hard time. But this was how he started his epoch-making project of Science and Civilisation in China. On 21^st March 1943 Needham arrived in Chongqing, the wartime capital of Nationalist China, as a representative of Sino-British Science Cooperation Office. Prior to his departure, the Chinese ambassador warned him that “those who have gone to China have a pretty hard time.” And he did.

To achieve his official missions, Needham made a dozen of expeditions traveling around 30,000 miles in China. During these expeditions, he watched carefully the manner in which a local gardener was grafting the plum tree; he inspected the ancient Dujiangyan irrigation system; he made full use of the nearly unrestricted access to the grottoes when he and his working partners were stranded in Dunhuang for six weeks as their truck broke down.

It was in these domestic gardens, along the embankment dams, inside the grottoes, that the famous “Needham Question” took shape. This question was an expansion of the note Needham had jotted on the invitation letter he received from BBC before his departure ---- “Sci. in general in China – why not develop?” It is from this sketchy note that he began his lifelong project bit by bit, publishing the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China in 1954, and resulting in the ongoing series under the guidance of the Needham Research Institute.

Returning to England from China Needham did not have an easy time. He carried on with his research in a tiny ancient college suite in Cambridge. There he drew the twelve-page proposal for his project. There he also received recognition, support, honours, criticism, and to some extent, political attacks. Needham was well known for his left-wing complaisance. In 1947 he was accused of being a Communist and his temporary position in UNESCO was questioned by the Truman’s administration. Needham promptly resigned and was relieved to be getting back to his researches. But he stayed loyal to his political belief. In 1949 he prefaced a pamphlet entitled I Saw New China written by Alun Falconer, then a journalist in Shanghai. Echoing Falconer’s optimistic description of the Communist takeover of the city in May 1949, Needham put forward the following questions in his preface:

“In our own time it was agreed on all hands that China must be modernized and industrialized. But did this mean that China would have to go through all the weary stages of capitalist development, the era of ‘dark satanic mills’ with which our own country was disfigured? Or would it be possible to advance by a great leap to a socialist economy? This is what the Chinese people have decided to do.

These queries and the “Needham Question” are two sides of the same coin. They are the prelude to debates about the “Great Divergence” or “Alternative Pathways”. If I am correct, these are also the questions which weave together the various themes of your Exhibition.

Thanks for your invitation. It triggers me to re-read the book The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester so that I can re-discover the Man – Joseph Needham – during a time which some of us might consider “hard”. I think our times are, in fact, “interesting”, as remarked by Eric Hobsbawm. Re-discovering Joseph Needham and his works will certainly add fun and value to our pursuit of knowledge in these interesting times. I wish you every success in the exhibition and hope that it will be watched and shared by more audiences outside the campus walls in this new cyberspace age.