The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  And through all this process, and in retrospect perhaps inevitably, he fell in love not simply with the language, but with China itself. He described his feeling as an intense connection, one that arose from his stupefied admiration for the people who, for the last 3,000 years, had made this ancient language the basis of their cultural continuum. The language was China: to love the language was to love China.

  So, late in the unexpectedly warm autumn of that year, 1939, when the first German planes were appearing in the English skies and war was beginning to engulf Europe, Joseph Needham decided that he had to get across the world, and see for himself what he now firmly believed was the manifold amazement of this country.

  Eventually a war would take him there—not, however, the European war, but the war in the East that had already been raging between China and Japan for the previous two years.

  Technically this was an undeclared conflict, widely seen by Europeans and Americans as something of a sideshow. Since it was not a formally declared conflict both Britain and America were officially able to remain aloof, at least to a degree. But it was a war of extraordinary viciousness, one which the writer Lin Yutang would later describe as “the most terrible, the most inhuman, the most brutal, the most devastating war in all of Asia’s history.”

  The fighting had broken out in July 1937,9 while Lu Gwei-djen was aboard her liner, edging toward London. She first learned of it on the day she arrived, when she read the evening newspapers. Every subsequent day in Cambridge she scoured the press avidly for news from home; and as China’s tragedies unfolded and expanded, she and Needham followed as best they could the twists and turns of the conflict.

  For Lu Gwei-djen it was particularly heartbreaking. Through the summer and autumn of 1937 the Japanese had mercilessly advanced against China’s eastern cities. Pounding attacks on Shanghai alone during the late summer, just weeks after Gwei-djen had left, resulted in the killing of more than 250,000 Chinese soldiers. One of the most famous war photographs of all time—that of a burned, crying baby sitting on railway tracks in the midst of a bombed, ruined city—brought the war into households around the world. There was a tidal wave of sympathy from a public who saw a vulnerable but determined China being pulverized and humiliated by the forces of evil from Japan.

  But no foreign government took action; no one helped. The Chinese, isolated and alone, fell back, and back, and back—“the tragedy of the retreat,” in the words of a Chinese officer, “being beyond description.” Japanese amphibious forces landed in November and, supported by bombers from the island then called Formosa and by heavy battleships moored in the Huangpu River, they poured inland along both banks of the Yangzi, their advance not even briefly halted by the carefully built copy of the Hindenburg Line behind which the Chinese had naively thought they might defend themselves.

  City by city, eastern China collapsed entirely. The Japanese forces left behind scenes of total ruin: all the buildings smashed, thousands dead, wandering dogs feeding on piles of corpses, and the few survivors staggering through the wreckage like ghosts. Within a month, by the middle of December, Japanese troops were at the old walls of Nanjing, China’s capital, which was Gwei-djen’s home.

  The story of the next seven weeks of savagery, of the unutterably terrible “rape of Nanking,” is now as well known as any of the atrocities of the European war. For Gwei-djen, unable to communicate with her family during that winter, the situation was almost unbearable. As it happens, her family survived; but tens of thousands of others died, and often in unimaginably awful ways—gang-raped, bayoneted, set ablaze, beheaded, eviscerated—and the terrified Chinese government was compelled to leave for a new fortress stronghold in the western mountains, Chongqing.

  The West still did precious little to help. In America there was great public sympathy for the plight of the Chinese, and its leaders were seen as symbolic heroes. Chiang Kai-shek’s face stared down from the cover of Time magazine, not least because the publisher, Henry Luce, who had been born in China of missionary parents, knew and liked him and his American-educated wife. President Roosevelt offered soothing words—his family, too, had long and intimate links with China, the Delanos having been partners in one of the greatest Chinese tea-shipping firms, and his mother having spent much of her childhood in the family mansion in Hong Kong, Rose Hill.

  But the president’s words were hardly matched by any actions of consequence, at least in the first four years of the war. Neutrality was the policy to which the American government was committed, and neutrality was what (certainly in September 1937, two months into the conflict) more than ninety percent of the American public demanded, no matter how sorry they felt for China. Not even the lethal Japanese bombing attack in December 1937 on the American gunboat the USS Panay, moored off Shanghai, caused Washington to change its mind. The Japanese said it had all been a dreadful mistake, apologized, made offers of compensation, and organized a campaign of letter-writing from Japan in which schoolgirls sent handwritten (and identically phrased) condolences to the American embassy in Tokyo. At this stage in its plans Japan wanted no military entanglement with the Americans. Washington continued to say it was appalled by what was happening in China but could and would do nothing. It could not, and would not, become involved. The Neutrality Act did not allow it.

  In Cambridge Joseph Needham was apoplectic. He was even more furious when the British government made it perfectly clear there would be absolutely no policy of sanctions against the Japanese. No matter what was happening in China in the late 1930s, Britain would stay out of the conflict.

  Not even the fact that the British ambassador to China, the remarkable Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen,10 had been strafed in his automobile in Shanghai by a Japanese fighter plane in August 1937, was severely wounded, and was sent to a hospital for a year in any way diminished the official esteem in which Tokyo was held by Whitehall. Indeed, there was a quiet hope expressed in official circles in London that Japan might be so worn down by a prolonged conflict in the vastness of China that it would be too exhausted to pursue any further imperial ambitions. Cynics and proponents of realpolitik held the view that a conflict between China and Japan was, so far as Britain’s wider interests were concerned, very nearly a good thing.

  So British banks were fully allowed to continue doing business with Japan, British ports officially welcomed Japanese ships, Japanese exports were on sale in British shops, and British oil helped fuel Japanese tanks and warships. In other words, business as usual.

  Needham’s opposition to his country’s stance on the war was born of his deep commitment to socialism on the one hand (which had been powerfully reinforced by a journey he had made to Moscow two years earlier), and a lover’s solidarity with his mistress on the other. At every opportunity he went to London to march, and to hand out pins with red-and-blue lapel flags printed with his own version of the seasonal message: “Help China. Don’t buy Japanese toys at Christmas.” He wrote letters to the newspapers, always on the Caius College letterhead, which tended to guarantee their publication. He was also a prominent backer of the famous Left Book Club, which was a powerful champion of China’s cause and which (by way of its publisher and founder Victor Gollancz) put out many of the pamphlets that explained—from a leftist point of view, of course—the situation in China to its 60,000 members across the country.11

  His older and more staid colleagues in the Senior Combination Room at Caius made it clear that they were uncomfortable with his behavior, that they feared the erratic behavior of this proto-Bolshevik in their midst. But Needham remained adamantly defiant: the situation in China was dire, and he was not about to change his mind or remain quietly at home, simply because of the dignity conferred on him by his position as a Cambridge don.

  Any of the old guard at Caius who suspected he might have been slacking had only to look at evidence showing that he was still working diligently at his biochemistry. Following his three-volume book on embryology in 1930, when he was just ove
r thirty, he now completed a second massive book on morphogenesis—the process whereby a living creature becomes endowed with its particular shape and form—in 1939, before he had reached forty. “Dorothy and I used to walk from the laboratory to join him for tea in his rooms in College,” wrote Gwei-djen. “Welcoming a break, he would jump up from his desk, stoke the fire of coal and wood logs, and make tea for us, humming and singing folk songs all the while. Then he would show us the pile of pages he had written on the typewriter that day.”

  Acclaim for the new book was well-nigh universal—especially in America, where he toured in 1940 to give lectures at the great universities of the East Coast. A reviewer at Harvard—who of course had no way to know what was coming two decades later—declared that Biochemistry and Morphogenesis, as the book was called, “will go down in the annals of science as Joseph Needham’s magnum opus, destined to take its place as one of the most truly epoch-making books in biology since Charles Darwin.”

  Moreover, he completed this book while he was still campaigning in England and lecturing in America for recognition of the plight of the Chinese, and at the same time was busy teaching his students, writing his half-crown monograph (as Henry Holorenshaw) on the history of a particular branch of English socialism, regularly giving morris dance performances, swimming naked, attending meetings of the Cambridge Communist Party, offering sermons from the pulpit at Thaxted Church, and living through the manifold complications of his peculiarly organized love life.

  It was perhaps merciful that late in the summer of 1939 Lu Gwei-djen left Cambridge for California, initially to attend the Sixth Pacific Science Congress. She then decided to stay on: she had an offer from Berkeley that she felt bound to accept—and Needham, in Cambridge, agreed, because he was eager to further his mistress’s career and because he came to America often enough. So the affair continued, at long distance, its ardor undiminished, with just the logistics making matters a little more trying.

  Through this whirlwind of activity Joseph Needham started to become famous—and famous, above all, in England during the early days of the war, for being one of China’s most vigorous champions. This fame was to become central to his future, largely because of a secret meeting in a house in North Oxford one foggy November evening in 1939, when a group of wise men decided that, if it was at all possible, Needham should go to China on a mission.

  The key figure in this endeavor was a young Chinese professor of philosophy, Luo Zhongshu, who was about to leave for China after a stint teaching at Oxford. He had held a professorship at a university in the city of Chengdu, and while he was at Oxford he received regular letters and telegrams from his former colleagues there, telling him in unsparing detail just how bad the situation was for them at home.

  Japan, it turned out, was engaged in a full frontal assault on China’s entire education system. The Japanese military apparently had a deep-seated loathing for China’s intellectual community, and this disdain was now manifesting itself in acts of brutality aimed specifically at China’s universities. Colleges in the cities of Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Guangzhou had been selected as early targets for bombings. Nankai University in Tianjin had been repeatedly bombed, and its ruins were set ablaze with kerosene. The main university in Beijing had been initially stripped by looters, and its academic buildings were converted into brothels, bars, and stables for the use of troops, while its deanery and sanitarium were made into hospitals and barracks for the Japanese defense forces based nearby.

  To people in England already steeled to the plight of China’s civilians—information about the “rape of Nanking” had leaked slowly and steadily out to the West, shocking all who heard it—the news of savagery being directed at China’s intellectuals was stunning. And when Luo began to make speeches to university audiences across England claiming that of the 100 colleges then operating in China, no fewer than fifty-two had been destroyed or badly damaged in the fighting, his listeners were shocked. Any tragedy that extended its reach into a country’s education system was seen as particularly dire. If China’s intellectual community was not to go into a terminal decline, then the West—and Britain in particular—had to help quickly.

  Professor Luo eventually took this message to a gathering where he thought that shock might be more readily converted into action. It was a meeting of senior wise men from Oxford and Cambridge who assembled on November 15, 1939, in Norham Gardens at the house of the famous religious scholar H. N. Spalding, who was then Oxford’s professor of eastern religion and ethics. Luo stood before the group and launched into what his listeners remembered as a vivid description of a new and tragic development: because of the Japanese attacks, entire Chinese universities were now having to take the hitherto unimagined step of fleeing, pell-mell, into the supposed safety of the Chinese hinterland.

  The audience members expressed their dismay—and then a determination that the British government should be persuaded of its moral duty to intervene in some way, to help the cause of China’s intellectual survival. It was swiftly agreed that a team of sympathetic Britons should be sent to China immediately, and that they should be charged with assessing the situation further, with finding out exactly what was needed, and how, precisely, any official help from the British government might best be directed.

  It took little time to decide on the ideal candidates for such an expedition. Two names presented themselves. The first was that of a man on their very doorstep: the Oxford University reader in Chinese philosophy, E. R. Hughes, who had formidable connections to the Chinese government, had a background of a quarter century working as a missionary deep in the Chinese countryside, and since his return to England had developed many connections to the inner sanctums of Whitehall.

  Joseph Needham was the second man to be put forward. He was something of a wild card, since all at the meeting knew he had never once been to China. But his intelligence, his exceptional linguistic abilities, and his very vocal passion for the rights of the Chinese people counted for much. Once his name was put forward that evening, it was unanimously accepted. And so Professor Luo wrote to him that very night, asking formally if he might be interested in taking part in a mission to China that would be of vital importance for the country’s future.

  Naturally, when Needham received the letter a few days later both he and Lu Gwei-djen (to whom he wrote in America) were excited beyond belief. All his months of marching, carrying placards, and writing letters—and perhaps even his halting attempts at calligraphy—seemed at last to have paid off, to be on the verge of bringing results. Someone was listening. The Chinese might get the help they wanted. And he might now actually be sent off to work in the country that so captivated him.

  But there was nothing definite, and much work still to do. There were many meetings and exchanges of letters that winter—sessions in Cambridge, sessions in London, the formation of committees, exchanges of telegrams (“At this time of great danger your efforts have brought us some comfort,” read one, from university professors stranded in Kunming), and finally the issuing of a number of formal “statements of intent” indicating that Britain’s finest universities were now bent on full cooperation with their opposite numbers in China.

  Needham wrote to the Chinese ambassador. “My wife and I are desirous of going to China to help the rebuilding of scientific life…. I had no interest in Chinese affairs until three years ago, but now I can speak and write Nanjing Mandarin.” The ambassador was warmly enthusiastic, but he warned Needham of the conditions: “Those who have gone to China,” he said, “have a pretty hard time.”

  It took eighteen months of diplomatic dithering and negotiation before Britain finally made the decision to send him. The British Council—the culturally evangelizing arm of the British Foreign Office—was the first organ of Churchill’s government to become formally involved. It did so first by way of a bland statement in the summer of 1941, to the effect that “it was extending its work into the field of Chinese intellectual cooperation.” Six months
later, in the spring of 1942, the head of the council’s science department, J. G. Crowther—a former contemporary of Needham’s at Cambridge and the science columnist for the Manchester Guardian who had famously first reported James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron—wrote privately to Needham. He had a vital and top-secret message:

  An urgent request from high quarters has arisen for an Englishman to go to China. There are great physical difficulties in transporting anyone to Chongqing at present, [but] it should be possible to secure the necessary places in planes.

  He who goes would have to be ready for anything.

  It was the moment Needham had been waiting for.

  And it was a moment that had come simply because a diplomatic logjam had finally been cleared. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor early in December 1941, and America and Britain had at last declared war. There was now no longer a need for any diplomatic niceties so far as Tokyo was concerned. Help could now be offered to the Chinese formally and publicly, and without even the slightest care as to what Japan might think.

  Whatever Needham might have thought privately about these months of diplomatic realities, when he read Crowther’s letter—as he did a dozen times over—there was no doubt. His heart leaped. He was now going to China, for sure. He had no idea just who “in high quarters” had come up with the idea, but it now appears that the request had an unlikely origin: the great scholar Sir George Sansom, an expert on Japan. At the time, Sansom was the senior civilian representative on a little-known body, the Far East War Council, which was based in Singapore and essentially decided how Britain should best prosecute its side of the conflict in the world east of Suez. It was probably Sansom’s suggestion that Needham, a Chinese-speaking fellow of the Royal Society, and a senior figure who was intimately connected with British scientific research, should be the one to go; further, it was likely that this decision would have been approved at a higher level still—quite possibly in Downing Street, by Winston Churchill.