"China, the West, and World History in Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China" by Robert Finlay, in Journal of World History (Fall 2000), Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2840 Kolowalu St., Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.

Thanks to British scholar Joseph Needham’s monumental Science and Civilisation in China (1954–98), westerners have a whole new appreciation of China’s richly inventive past. Especially compelling was his account of 15thcentury Chinese expeditions to Southeast Asia and, through the Indian Ocean, to India, Arabia, and Africa. Renowned now as voyages of discovery, they show up in many notable treatments of world history. Needham drew a sharp contrast between those peaceful Ming dynasty expeditions (1405–33) of Zheng He, whom he portrays as China’s answer to Vasco da Gama, and the early-16th-century Portuguese voyages of conquest. But Needham’s portrait of the Ming expeditions is "seriously skewed," argues Finlay, a historian at the University of Arkansas.

Though Needham (1900–95) acknowledged that the motives behind the seven expeditions by Zheng He’s 300-odd junks were mixed, he claimed that the chief purpose, growing stronger with each expedition, was "protoscientific"—the scholarly gathering of rare materials and knowledge. Trade, though extensive, was incidental, he maintained, and the peaceful fleet’s 26,000 troops had "primarily ceremonial" duties since they were part of "a navy paying friendly visits to foreign ports." Far more important than merchants and military men, according to Needham, were the fleet’s astronomers, geomancers, physicians, and naturalists.

The reality was quite different, Finlay argues. The eunuch admiral Zheng He "did not, as Needham asserts, inspire the Ming voyages, and there is no significant sense in which he can be regarded as an explorer. He commanded the maritime expeditions as a military agent of the Yongle emperor, a ruler who had no interest in voyages of discovery.... Aggressive and ruthless, Yongle was one of the most militaristic rulers in Chinese history." He had come to power in a bloody civil war, personally commanded campaigns against the Mongols, and, starting in 1406—the year after Zheng He’s fleet first sailed to Southeast Asia—sent an army of more than 200,000 men to invade Vietnam. "Yet the emperor does not figure in Needham’s analysis," Finlay observes.

The 26,000 troops on the Chinese junks were not "a ceremonial cortege for diplomatic occasions" (being much too numerous and expensive for that), Finlay says, but rather "an expeditionary force for executing the emperor’s will, whether that meant militarizing the tribute system, suppressing piracy in Southeast Asia, bringing overseas Chinese ports under control, or even making Siam and Java vassal states of the empire." And the many "experienced, heavily armed" troops, not the " ‘calm and pacific’ " nature of the Chinese, were the reason that the voyages were generally tranquil. Nor was trade merely incidental, "for Yongle evidently intended to harness the force (and profits) of seaborne commerce to serve the purposes of imperial hegemony in Southeast Asia."