Reading up a little on the
Needham Question, I ran across these gems:
Needham's question can thus be understood to mean, Why didn't China use gunpowder to destroy feudal walls? Why didn't China use the compass to cross the Pacific and discover America, or to find an all-sea route to Western Europe? Why didn't China undergo a Renaissance or Reformation? The implication is that even though China possessed these technologies, it did not change much. Essentially Needham's question is asking, What was wrong with China?
Actually, there was nothing wrong with China. China was changed fundamentally by these inventions. But in order to see the changes, one must abandon the search for peculiarly European events in Chinese history, and look instead at China itself before and after these breakthroughs.
Chinese elites regarded their country as the ''Middle Kingdom'' and believed they had nothing to learn from barbarians abroad. India exhibited much of the same self-satisfaction. ''Indians didn't go to Portugal not because they couldn't but because they didn't want to,'' mused M. P. Sridharan, a historian, as we sat talking on the porch of his home in Calicut.
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