[2008.06.07] Question marks 中国创新疑问重重

Chinese invention
中国创新
Question marks
众多疑问

Jun 5th 2008
From The Economist print edition
2008年6月5日
《经济学人》印刷版

Why did China’s scientific innovation, once so advanced, suddenly collapse? A British academic made this question his life’s work
为何曾经一度领先的中国科技创新，突然之间就土崩瓦解了？一位英国学者毕生都致力于探求这个疑问的答案。

FEW people, other than scholars, will be familiar with the story of the Cambridge don whose study of China’s scientific history helped to change the West’s appraisal of a civilisation once thought hopelessly backward. By the time Joseph Needham died in 1995, he had published 17 volumes of his “Science and Civilisation in China” series, including several that he wrote entirely on his own.
除了专业研究者们，鲜有人知正是一位剑桥学者的中国科学史研究改变了西方史学界对于中国文明落后无望的一贯看法。到1995年约瑟夫尼达姆去世时，业已出版了17卷中国科学技术史系列丛书，其中几卷由他亲自执笔完成。

The Chinese began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?
中国人在早于约翰尼斯古腾堡将印刷技术引进德国前600年就开始使用印刷术了。他们建造的第一座擒纵装置设备比欧洲早700年。而他们对于指南针的使用比 其他地方有史料记载的出现至少早1个世纪。那末到底是什么原因，使得这个高度发达文明的前进脚步在15世纪中叶戛然而止呢？

So powerful has Needham’s contribution been to the historiography of Chinese science that this conundrum is still known as “The Needham Question”. Even the Chinese themselves use it: the phrase in Mandarin is Li Yuese nanti.
尼达姆对于中国科技史研究的贡献如此巨大，以致该难题都被冠名以“尼达姆问题”并沿用下来。甚至中国人都自己采用这个名称，在学术界称作李约瑟难题。

Simon Winchester’s lively biography (see article) focuses on what drove Needham to wrestle with this issue. In 1936 three Chinese assistants came to work in his biochemistry laboratory. One, Lu Gwei-djen, who came from Nanjing, began teaching him Chinese, which ignited Needham’s interest in the country’s technological and scientific past. He retrained as a Sinologist and took a job in Chongqing as Britain’s scientific emissary.
西蒙温彻斯特的纪实传记着重描述了是何因素驱使李约瑟跟这个难题较上真的。在1936年，3名中国助手来到他的生物化学实验室工作。其中一个叫鲁桂珍的南 京人，开始教授他中文，此举激发了李约瑟对这个国家科学技术历史的浓厚兴趣。此后他重新深造成为一位汉学家，并且作为英国驻华使馆科学参赞在重庆谋得一份 工作。

Mr Winchester draws much from Needham’s diaries which describe an unconventional lifestyle, an open marriage and numerous extra-marital affairs, as well as exotic adventures travelling across China in search of its science.
温彻斯特先生从李约瑟的日记中引用了大量翔实资料，这本日记记述了李约瑟突破传统的生活方式，开放的婚姻以及众多私事，还包括他为调查科技史实而横穿中国的探险之旅。

Among Needham’s destinations in his Chevrolet truck was Dujiangyan, a city badly hit by the recent earthquake in Sichuan Province. There he was able to study a huge irrigation project that was created 2,300 years ago and which still stands today, though now cracked by the earthquake. At that time, only the Mesopotamians had made such strides in controlling their rivers, Mr Winchester says.
李约瑟的雪伏兰敞篷卡车之旅的众多目的地之一是都江堰，一座刚刚遭受地震重创的四川城市。在这里他可以研究一座竣工于2300年前，迄今仍维持运转的浩大 灌溉工程。如今，它因地震遭到了破坏。温彻斯特先生称，在那个时代，只有美索不达米亚人在控制河流上取得了可以与之媲美的成就。

Needham’s focus on China’s achievements naturally won him praise there. The Republican government granted him one of its highest honours shortly before it was overthrown by the Communist Party in 1949. But Needham also had strong ties with China’s new rulers. This controversial relationship threatened to blight his career. His participation in a Chinese-led inquiry into alleged American use of germ warfare during the Korean war, together with his failure to be more sceptical about what many believe to have been Soviet and Chinese fakery, prompted many of his peers in the West to shun him.
李约瑟对中国自然科学所取得成就的关注，为他在中国赢得了广泛赞誉。国民政府在被共产党推翻前夕，还授予他一项最高荣誉。李约瑟同中国的新执政者们也联系 紧密。这种有争议的关系严重威胁到他的事业。他参与中国主导的对所谓美军在战争中使用细菌武器的调查，加之在很多人怀疑那是苏联和中国捏造的事实时他却深 信不疑，使得许多西方同行对他避而远之。

Needham’s Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius, however, retained its faith in his scholarship and gave him extraordinary freedom from normal academic duties to pursue his book-writing.
然而，他的母校剑桥大学康韦尔科斯学院对他的学识仍保有信心，并且给予他可以不参与日常学术任务的自由，使他能专心完成著述。

Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.
李约瑟并未充分给出中国创新能力枯竭的原因。其他学者纷纷提出自己的见解:在中古封建社会人们热衷于追名逐利，缺乏资产阶级对竞争的鼓励和自我完善体制的 建立；庞大的中国无法像欧洲小国那样，在激烈的生存竞争下衍生出科技竞赛；此外中国的官僚集权主义也导致科技创新体系无法形成。

With its unreformed one-party system, its rote-learning in schools and state control of big businesses, “new China” is hardly a haven for innovative thinking. Yet the Chinese continue to fret about the Needham question. A Communist Party chief of a middle school in central China recently said that it deserved deep thought and that the answer lay in an education system that fails to emphasise improving “character”. A former government minister also referred to Needham’s lament that China had produced no idea or invention of global impact for more than 500 years. Its contribution henceforth, the official said, should be “harmony”.
在一党执政体系，学校的填鸭式教育以及国营经济体制下，新中国无法成为思想创新的乐土。至今中国仍然被李约瑟问题所困扰。中国华中地区的一位中学校长指 出，这个问题值得深思，症结就在于现行教育体制不注重学生个性培养。一位前政府官员也提到，李约瑟慨叹中国已经500多年没有出现能影响世界的思想和发明 了。这位官员还称，中国以后的贡献将是和谐。

Work on “Science and Civilisation in China” has pressed on since Needham’s death. A variety of authors continue to contribute on topics that stretch from mining to agro-industries and forestry. The latest, out this year, is part 11 of volume five. Each part is a book, in this case a 512-page tome on ferrous metallurgy by Donald B. Wagner, the 24th book in the series.
编纂中国科学技术史的工作在李约瑟去世后继续开展。各类学者继续从事着从采矿业到农业和林业的各种专题写作。第5卷的11部分即将于年内出版。每一部分都独立成书，这是一部关于冶金炼铁业的512页大部头书，作者唐纳德瓦格纳，是这一系列的第24本书。

译者：就是喜欢美女　http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=11963&extra=page%3D1