The remarkable history of Chinese invention - Why was China erased from Western memory?
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Joseph Needham was an English
medical doctor and biologist, teaching in England in the 1930s. By an accident
of fate he acquired some Chinese students, and was intrigued to hear their
claims of so many medical and scientific discoveries having originated in China,
rather than in the West.
Needham became fully fluent in
Chinese, and eventually moved to China in 1942 to investigate these claims and
to research the entire history of Chinese invention. That work led to an
astonishing voyage of historical discovery.
Needham originally planned to
write a book cataloguing Chinese inventions, but his first volume barely
scratched the surface of his subject. He slowly gatherred many of his students
into this enterprise, and they eventually wrote a collection of 26 books, to
catalog the history of Chinese discovery.
Myth and Misrepresentation
It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of
things invented by the Chinese many hundreds of years, and often several
millennia, before they appeared in the West.
All the myths about China and the Chinese being good at
'memorising and passing exams', but being unable to think independently or to be
imaginative and creative, are just that - myths. Those stories were never true,
not then and not now.
This isn't a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks,
but encompasses the entire range of human knowledge from endocrinoloy to
mathematics, from agriculture to astronomy.
How could such facts have been hidden from the entire
Western world for so long? And why were they withheld? Needham made his
discoveries in the 1940s, but our Western education has never made reference to
them, never acknowledged them.
We Westerners were taught that virtually all inventions
and discoveries arose in Europe but, thanks to Joseph Needham, we have clear
documentation proving they existed in China often 1,000 or more years before the
Europeans copied them.
In all of the above, Needham has published not only old
Chinese texts, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these
items, from texts that can be accurately dated. These are not wild claims
or
supppositions; the evidence is both conclusive and striking, and is there
for anyone to examine.
Where has the world been, for so many years? How could
all of this have remained hidden? How - and Why - did the West so thoroughly
erase China from the world's current historical memory?
China's Former World Position
Eurocentric historians have distorted and ignored
China's dominant role in the world economy until about 1800. There exists an
enormous amount of empirical data proving China's economic and technological
superiority over Western civilization for the better part of several
millennia.
Given that China was the world's supreme technological
power up to about 1800, it is especially important to emphasize that this is
what made the West's emergence possible. It was only by borrowing, copying, and
assimilating Chinese innovations and China's much more advanced technology that
the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist
economies.
Until then, China was the leading trading nation, with
long distance trade reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and
Europe. Even as late as the early 19th century China's merchants employed
130,000 private transport ships, several times that of Britain, and China had
held this pre-eminent position for millennia.
China's innovations in the production of paper, book
printing, firearms and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were
transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational
system.
Moreover, banking, a stable paper money economy,
excellent manufacturing and high agricultural yields resulted in China 's per
capita income surpassing that of Great Britain until the late 1700s.
China's Opening to, and Withdrawal from, the
World
From this study of Chinese inventions and discoveries, a
theory is developing about the reasons China closed itself off from the world
some hundreds of years ago.
It's almost impossible to overstate that a first thought
of anyone reviewing all this research would be that the world must have seemed
very primitive to China 500 years ago. Here are two noteworthy
examples:
China's agriculture and comparative food production was
orders of magnitude ahead of the West, and of other countries as well, for more
than 1,000 years. Compared to China, the rest of the world must have seemed
truly "third world" at the time.
Europe and other nations had difficulty just feeding
themselves, while China could produce surplus food in abundance, in spite of
having a much greater population.
China had invented the seed drill, sowing in rows, a
scientifically-efficent plow that is still in use around the world today, animal
harnesses and collars, the winnowing fan, the spinning wheel, and so much
more.
China's advances in agriculture were eagerly copied by
the Europeans and were the enabling cause of Europe's agricultural revolution
that first permitted it to begin feeding itself adequately.
More than 1,000 years ago, China's sailing ships were
far larger than any in the rest of the world. The Chinese invented and deployed
multiple masts, luff sails that permitted sailing into the wind.
They invented the rudder, enabling ships to be steered.
Chinese ships had watertight compartments, enabling them to complete journeys
even when damaged.
The Chinese invented the compass, and had such extensive
astronomical knowledge that they could navigate the world by the stars, while
Western ships were small, uncontrollable and fragile, and were useless for
travelling any distance.
As Needham so strongly pointed out, China was so far
ahead of the Western world in sailing and navigation that comparisons are just
embarrassing.
When the Chinese conducted their voyages of exploration
around the world, with Zhang He and others, they must have been disappointed in
what they found.
The rest of the world had no paper or printing, no
mathematics, no science, little medicine of note, almost no metallurgy to speak
of, a most primitive agriculture, no manufactures of any worthy kind, no
porcelain, no spinning wheels or weaving looms to make clothing. No
nothing.
From reviewing the history of Chinese invention, one
easily develops an increasingly strong feeling the Chinese looked at the world
and found nothing they wanted, nothing to interest them, in all those societies
that were centuries, and in some cases millennia, behind China in almost every
way.
One can easily theorise that this is one of the reasons
China closed itself off from the world at that time. In all of China's travels
and exploration, it would have been easy to conclude that other parts of
the
world were so backward there was nothing to be gained from prolonged
contact.
One can imagine they returned home and closed the door,
perhaps planning to return in another 500 years to see if things had progressed.
With the addition of detail, this is most likely how events
transpired.
The Christian West Shows its
Appreciation
What China didn't count on, was the West taking all
these ideas, turning them into weapons of colonisation and war, and returning to
the nation that was the source of that knowledge, and invading it - along with
every other nation they could find, to colonise, to steal the resources, to
enslave and massacre the populations.
China's interest was always only exploration and trade.
The Chinese were never expansionist or warlike, wanting only to protect their
own borders from invasion from the North. China was quite unprepared for the
violent nature and savage brutality of the Christians who sailed the world with
God on their side, invoking His blessing on their countless
atrocities.
Coupled with a weak domestic government at the time, and
with the inventiveness of the Baghdad Jews in using opium to profit while
enslaving a nation for the British Empire, and the greed and savagery of the
White-Supremacist British, we have the severe downward swing for 100 or more
years.
China's Inventiveness has not ended. It may have only
just begun
Now China is finally recovering and once again taking
its rightful place in the world.
China is back on track to continue where it left off 200
years ago. Today, China is putting men in space, has built a space station that
functions well, and plans to put men on the moon. This is all done without
Western technology, since the West won't share.
China is building its own GPS system, again with
entirely home-grown technology, and has built a submersible that can descend
below 7,000 meters into the sea. Only one other nation can do that, and China
didn't get their help.
China leads the world in HSR train technology, and is
rapidly developing its own aircraft industry and supersonic missile
technology.
China leads the world in the human genome mapping, and
is rapidly progressing in a long list of other fields, not only catching up to
the West but close to surpassing it.
China's large-scale engineering skills are second to
none in the world today. China built a computer that was 150% faster than the
fastest in the world - with an entirely Chinese-developed operating
system.
China already leads the world in cat-scan technology and
in DNA mapping and synthesising, also in many medical fields such as laser eye
surgery and cornea transplants.
The only thing that might derail China's rise is the
very real danger of the US starting yet another competitive "war of liberation"
in blind pursuit of its stated objective of full-scale global
dominance.
