Free The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester Page B

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    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.
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    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 somecomfort,” 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