Here is Nathan Sivin’s article on the Needham Question:
This essay makes the case for two conclusions. First, why the scientific revolution did not take place in China is not a question that historical research can answer. It commends attention to the fallacies that lead people to ask it. Second, a scientific revolution, by the criteria that historians of science use, did take place in China in the eighteenth century. It did not, however, have the social consequences that we assume a scientific revolution will have. It suggests that those assumptions are mistaken.
Anyone who has looked into the history of science, technology, and medicine in the last generation or so has been aware that all the great civilizations of the ancient world had their own sophisticated traditions. The Chinese traditions, because they are recorded so fully, and because they were more independent of European influence than the Islamic and Indian ones, are particularly fascinating if we want to compare how understanding of Nature varies in different cultural circumstances. What the Chinese knew and did was explained by Chinese and Japanese historians beginning in the 1920’s. My English colleague Joseph Needham began calling their work to the attention of educated people in the West, and encouraging them to add to it, in the 1950’s. By now it is one of the most flourishing fields in the history of science, with perhaps a thousand specialists in China, Japan, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.
