The great inertia: Scientific stagnation in traditional China

While working at the Department of History at Northwestern University as a visiting scholar, I have recently finished drafting a three-essay critical and macro-historical analysis, which is entitled The Great Inertia. I started this work about two and a half years ago, and now I can bring what I consider a piece of good news. Recently in China there appeared in one of the leading philosophical periodicals, Journal of Dialectics of Nature, a special section discussing "the causes of China's scientific and technological backwardness in recent times." I of course take no personal credit for this event, but I am really very pleased with it, because I think that after more than thirty years of blind self-glorification, this small official reorientation approaches a truly worthy, genuinely significant, indeed uniquely important question for China. If we trace the matter further back we may say that this is not a small reorientation, but a departure from the long-established Stalinist tradition in all Communist nations. The three more or less independent essays of my manuscript are: 1. The Phenomenology of Chinese Stagnation in Physical Sciences; 2. Science and Technology in Traditional China—A Source Itself Inert; 3. Needham's "Chinese Correlativism" and Misunderstanding of Physics.