Free The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester

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 over 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