I’ve just finished reading Simon Winchester’s “The Man Who Loved China: the fantastic story of the eccentric scientist who unlocked the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.” The book is a biography of the British biochemist Joseph Needham, who forsook his work in a field in which by the age of 30 he had already distinguished himself to become the foremost expert in the area of the History of Science in China. Already married, he fell head over heels in love with a Chinese protege who had traveled all the way from Nanjing in 1937 to Cambridge University to study under Professor Needham (ahem). For nearly sixty years after, Needham’s life would be proscribed by the walls of one university, the love of two women and the history of one country – China. Punctuated by the occasional world war and red-communist witch hunt, Needham etched a deep mark in the West’s perception of China through his mega-tome Science and Civilization in China. The seventeen-volume series took nearly forty years to write after he began the work in the early 1950s.

Two questions that kept gnawing at me while I read the book were: So what happened to ALL scientific Innovation in China (Innovation with a capital “I”) – a question that haunted Needham as well; and Why don’t China Hands today “love” China the way China Hands from the early 1900s through 1976 (with the death of Mao Zedong) did? Scholars still debate the answer to the first question. I have my ideas about the second question.

When China Hands – essentially Westerners sent to either minister to the Chinese as missionaries, or the journalists that covered the greatest colonial battleground in decades (I don’t consider government suits posted in China Hands) – made their way to China the country was in a pitiful state. The foreign government that had assumed the mantle of the Ming Dynasty – the Manchus – had not developed the country, and essentially allowed it to disintegrate from the edges to the rotten, corrupt core that was the Qing court. Other foreigners – as every schoolboy should know – picked at what was economically viable.

China Hands for the most part seemed to have a genuine compassion for China and its people during one of the worst periods of any country’s history. In general, they saw China and the misery of the times as a way to make a difference in the world, however altruistic it might seem to us today. The depth of their emotion comes through in much of their fabulous writing.

Today and for the last 30 years, China has chosen its direction, and it ain’t pretty. Especially since the uncertain times of the Cultural Revolution, the powers that be have been identifying the country with wounds the rest of the world has reconciled itself with, and bases its mantle to govern on how many jobs it creates and where it is in the world’s ranking of GDPs. It’s tough to be romantic about greed. Being a China Hand now is less like a tryst and more like – well, being married.

Nevertheless, having myself been trained as a scientist (Physics), with a concentration in the History of Science, and now having made China my home, I admit to enjoying the book a great deal. It was a good read, a fast read. Breezy, without quite the same level of detail as Paul French’s biography about Carl Crow. Still, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the China Hands that lived in China during the Japanese occupation of the country. Also, if you’re particularly interested in learning just how innovative the Chinese were for centuries until the middle of the Ming dynasty, then this is the book for you.