First, the origin of Needham problem
Tracing back to the "Needham problem", we will know that before Needham, similar questions were raised. As early as17th century, missionaries in China had noticed the "backward problem" of science in China. The Notes of China by Matteo Ricci (16 1552- 10), an early missionary, is the first work that systematically and comprehensively introduces China's science and technology after the History of Great China by the Spanish writer Mendoza. Dominique Parrenin, a French missionary who came to China after Matteo Ricci, was the first person to put forward the problem of backwardness in the early days. Missionaries' introduction to China and their comments on "China's backward science" even set off a "frenzy" of European studies on China in 17 and 18 centuries. Some famous thinkers and scientists, such as Boyle, Leibniz, Cassini, Voltaire, Kessler, Hume, Diderot and Montesquieu, all paid attention to China's science and technology.
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the New Culture Movement in China reached its climax, the problem of "backwardness" became a hot topic discussed by China scholars. 19 15 years, Ren Hongjuan (1886- 19 1), the founder of China Science Society and Science magazine, published the book "Say No China" in the first volume of Science magazine. Since then, many China scholars have joined the discussion on this issue. For example, Liang Qichao and Feng Youlan both expressed their opinions on such issues.
During 1944, when the Chinese Science Society celebrated its 30th anniversary, Joseph Needham attended the annual meeting held in Meitan, Guizhou, and delivered a speech entitled "Science and China Culture". In his speech, he criticized some western and China scholars' arguments that there was no science in ancient China for the first time. He said that China's ancient philosophy was very close to scientific explanation, and China's invention had a great influence on the whole world. Therefore, the basic question is why modern experimental science and its related theoretical system originated in the West instead of China. Here, Needham has actually put forward the so-called "Needham puzzle" very clearly.
In an exclusive interview with reporters on March 19, 2003, Mr. Gukley, the current director of Needham Institute, said that Needham's conclusion on this issue was that in the past 2000 years, there was a feudal bureaucracy in China, which had two influences. The positive effect is that China selected a large number of intelligent and well-educated people through the imperial examination system. Their management keeps China in order and enables China to develop science and technology very effectively. In this respect, from the decline of the Roman Empire to modern times, China has obvious advantages over Europe. The negative effects are: the highly centralized power system, coupled with the practice of selecting talents through the imperial examination, make it difficult for new ideas to be accepted by the society, and there is almost no competition in the field of technological development. At the same time, in Europe, there is fierce competition in the field of technology development. In this respect, China since the Qin Dynasty is not only different from Europe in the Qing Dynasty, but even worse than China in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, due to the competition among different vassal states in some areas, the whole China produced a large number of intellectual achievements. [2] In short, Needham's own answer to Needham's problem mainly comes from the social system.
Second, the status quo of China's ancient intellectual property system
(1) Copyright system
China has the concept of copyright for a long time. Since the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, most classical literature has been signed by the author, and some works even take the author's name or the name of the ancestor of the school as their own names. Plagiarists are condemned by the society, which shows that ancient scholars in China have realized the author's personal rights such as the right of signature, and at the same time, it also reflects the social respect for these rights and the hazy awareness of the rights of works. Of course, this awareness of rights is very simple, and there is basically no content of property rights.
In ancient China, before the invention of printing, culture was spread by oral and handwritten means, and works were difficult to become commodities. With the emergence of block printing and movable type printing, works have been widely spread, and publishers have benefited from it. These businessmen began to seek legal protection to prevent others from counterfeiting. According to relevant data, there have been records of copyright protection in Song Dynasty. For example, during the Xianchun period of the Southern Song Dynasty, Zhejiang, Zhejiang and other places published special articles to safeguard the rights and interests of four books, such as Yu Fang Sheng Lan. After the Five Dynasties, in the third year of Changxing in the Tang Dynasty, the court ordered Tian Min to preside over the revision of the Nine Classics of imperial academy, and "printed and sold it hard". This was the beginning of official book engraving, and it was the first "publishing house" in the world to print books on a large scale at that time. In order to protect the original edition of the Nine Classics, the court once ordered that ordinary people should not engrave books, thus protecting imperial academy's exclusive right to publish the Nine Classics, which was equivalent to the franchise system that appeared in Europe later. These can be the seeds of copyright protection in China.
Since the Song Dynasty, there have been many cases in ancient China that relied on the relevant documents of the central and local governments to protect the rights and interests of authors, editors and publishers, and prohibited others from using the "reproduction right" without authorization. In China, historically, the protection of engraving publishers in the form of prohibition has never been replaced by the comprehensive copyright protection of written law, that is, there has never been a national copyright protection system. It was not until 1903 that the Qing government signed the Sino-US Revised Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with the United States, thus using the word "copyright" in Chinese. Emperor Guangxu still issued an imperial edict to protect the exclusive right to reprint Jiutong Classification. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, influenced by western culture, the Qing Dynasty imitated the legislative system of European continental law system and compiled new laws. 19 10, the copyright law of the Qing dynasty was the first copyright law in the history of China.
(2) Patent system
According to Han Feizi, in ancient times, a generation of families who were engaged in washing and dyeing developed a medicine that didn't touch their hands. A counselor bought a prescription with a huge sum of money, and later prepared to use it for his own soldiers, defeating a strong enemy, and the counselor also became an official. From this story, we can know that as early as the Warring States period, China people knew the use value and value of knowledge and used it as a special property. But no independent intellectual property system was developed at that time.
/kloc-In the middle of the 9th century, Hong Rengan, the leader of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, put forward the idea of establishing a patent system in his New Chapter of Capitalism. The specific patent form appeared in Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty. 188 1 year, the bourgeois reformist Zheng wrote to Li Hongzhang, the minister of Beiyang in the Qing Dynasty, demanding that the weaving technology patent of Shanghai woven layout be1year. Subsequently, some new processes and technologies applied for patents, and the number of patents approved was also increasing. Under the impetus of the Reform Movement, Emperor Guangxu promulgated the first patent-related regulation in the history of China in May 1898-the Charter of Awarding Awards for Revitalizing Craft. The patent right here is essentially a franchise, which is different from the current patent right. Later, due to the strong opposition of the die-hards, the patents advocated by the reformists have not been put into practice. Therefore, the patent system was not established and developed in China until the late Qing Dynasty. Strictly speaking, the establishment and formation of China's patent system began after the Revolution of 1911. 191212 In February, the then Ministry of Industry and Commerce promulgated the Provisional Regulations on Award Technology. Legally speaking, this is the first written law in China, which has some elements of the basic principles of modern patent law.
(3) Trademark system
Trademarks are special symbols used in commodities. In the early days of natural economy, even with some inscriptions and year numbers, some products only played the role of expressing private rights, decoration or commemoration. With the emergence and development of commodity production and exchange, some signs have played a role in distinguishing product producers. Judging from the unearthed pottery, although the symbolic meanings of the mouth edge and the bottom are not very clear at present, compared with those vivid images on the same object, they can not be regarded as ornamental in terms of artistic skills or attached parts. On the contrary, since then, history has proved that they can only be used as an explanation to distinguish the owner and manufacturer of things. This sign, which only has a single attribute to distinguish producers, does not have the function of promoting products and providing quality assurance. Although it is not a trademark in the modern sense, it can be said to be the embryonic form of a modern trademark.
According to the pre-Qin Han Feizi, the earliest shop sign in China appeared more than 2,000 years ago, which was a "flag" or "brand" made of cloth and silk. This is a store sign with mark recognition function. Commodity exchange and market development during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period provided conditions for the emergence of ancient trademarks in China. During the Han and Tang dynasties, it was also common to use marks on commodities. With the development of commerce, the trademarks of China in Song Dynasty were relatively complete, and the number of well-known trademarks and trade names increased. The earliest relatively complete trademark was the "Liu Jia Gong Fu Needle Shop" in Jinan, Shandong Province in the Northern Song Dynasty. The graphic trademark of "recognizing the white rabbit in front of the door as a souvenir" was used, and the copper plate printed with the trademark of "White Rabbit" is now displayed in the China History Museum.
Since the Opium War, due to the invasion of imperialism, many foreign goods and foreign trademark have appeared. With the development of national industry, many trademarks appeared in modern China, and the trademark legal system began to take shape in modern China. 1904, the Qing government promulgated the first trademark law in the history of China-the Articles of Association for Trial Trademark Registration.
Three. Understanding Needham Problem from the Perspective of Property Right System
The last section shows that in ancient China, the intellectual property system had sprouted. So, what will this intellectual property situation in China give us to answer Needham's puzzle?
Mr. Zheng believes that "all intellectual property scholars in the East and West, without exception, believe that copyright appears with the adoption of printing." In addition, Mr. Zheng believes that "if copyright does appear with the adoption of printing, it should first appear in China." [3] However, chronological order does not represent logical cause and result. In fact, although China has a history of leading science and technology for thousands of years and put movable type printing into production practice at the earliest, China has not produced an intellectual property system in the modern sense. Science and technology is a prerequisite for the emergence of intellectual property system, but it is not a sufficient condition. It is generally believed that "intellectual property rights are neither derived from any kind of civil rights nor from any kind of property rights. It originated from the privilege of feudal society. " [4] At this point, China has the same or even earlier so-called "starting point" as the western modern intellectual property system. But in fact, the result is that although China has similar feudal privileges, this feudal privilege has not been transformed into "private rights" in the end. Although at the same time, it can be considered that under the theme of ancient imperial power control in China, the feudal privilege law objectively protected some private rights. [5]
As the winner of 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics, D. North studied the evolution of various social systems in the West, and pointed out that the rise of the Western world in the past 200 years was due to finding an effective system to protect tangible property rights and intangible property rights, which greatly reduced transaction costs and encouraged commodity production and intellectual investment. Some scholars believe that "before North, the mainstream theory of modern history explained the industrial revolution and the subsequent modern economic growth, which was basically based on scientific discoveries (such as the emergence of Newtonian mechanics), technological innovation, wave of invention, education and capital accumulation-but this theory can't stand scrutiny. A fatal criticism is that in the middle of14th century, the Chinese Empire, the world's first power at that time, reached the level of Western Europe on the eve of the industrial revolution in science and technology, education and capital accumulation. In fact, the technical foundation that gave birth to the industrial revolution in Western Europe basically came from China. " [6] Interestingly, some economic historians have suggested that China failed to have an industrial revolution under the condition of high-tech accumulation, mainly because of the lack of entrepreneurs in China. North believes that "the condition for the emergence of an entrepreneurial class in a society and its continuous development and growth is that the society needs to create a system to support the entrepreneurial class." This system is the intellectual property system. "Economic historians have confirmed North's conjecture through empirical research. As an intellectual property protection system, the patent and copyright system was first established and developed in Britain and the Netherlands. The reason why other European countries lag behind these two countries in the industrial revolution is precisely because they lag behind these two countries in the implementation of the intellectual property system. " [7]
The emergence of western intellectual property system has experienced hundreds of years of gestation. In the fierce transformation of social transformation, the development and changes of politics, economy, science and technology, ideology and culture either constitute the mother soil on which this new system depends or provide the impetus for the birth of this new right. First, the emergence of new technologies. /kloc-since the 0/5th century, with the formation of capitalist relations of production and the development of workshop handicraft industry, there has been a social demand in European countries to adopt advanced technology, manufacture and use advanced production tools and various machines, and technology has made great progress. Among them, the greatest progress is reflected in the textile, mining, metallurgy and chemical sectors closely related to the development of capitalist economy. [8] In the process of applying science and technology to social production, knowledge products and material products begin to have the same commodity meaning. These technological advances have laid a solid technical foundation for the emergence of industrial civilization and the emergence of intellectual property system with the mission of protecting industrial civilization. Secondly, it is the establishment of new cultural values. 14-16th century, the Renaissance movement initiated by the bourgeoisie in western Europe inspired people to transform the world, study nature and attach importance to practical and useful knowledge. The new cultural values put forward during the Renaissance provided the bourgeoisie with the necessary cultural and ideological preparations by using science and technology as material weapons and private rights as legal weapons. Third, it is the bud of new political civilization. During the British bourgeois revolution in the middle of17th century, thinkers and politicians from Hobbes, Milton to Locke all advocated that sovereignty belongs to the people, equality and freedom, and emphasized the inviolability of private property. In particular, Locke's works clarified the principles of the bourgeoisie on property and political power, and summarized the disputes between the British bourgeoisie and new noble on property and political power in the17th century. The gradual formation of British bourgeois political thought represented by Locke and the European Enlightenment represented by Montesquieu in the18th century under its influence made important political and ideological preparations for European countries to formulate their own laws, including intellectual property systems. Finally, the revival of Roman law. Since 12 century, Europe has started the revival of Roman law. Marx's classic writer pointed out: "When private ownership was further developed in industry and commerce, the detailed Roman private law was immediately restored and regained its prestige." [9] Although there was no intellectual property system in ancient Rome, intellectual property was related to Roman intangible property concept, public property theory, object transfer and infringement theory, and legal principles and rules such as property ownership, public domain, property right transaction and intangible infringement of copyright and intellectual property. The revival of Roman private law provides useful legal thinking materials for the formulation of modern intellectual property system.
To sum up, it can be said that North's explanation of the reasons for the accelerated development of western modern times has two basic and extended meanings for accurately answering Needham's problem. The basic aspect is the historical condition that North's work leads us to pay attention to the evolution from the traditional informal rules of knowledge production to the formal rules, because, as pointed out in this paper, there is no shortage of informal rules that are suitable for the development of science and technology in ancient China. In the extension, North's work shows a research scheme that integrates factors from property rights, politics, ideology to cultural beliefs. Because the synthesis provided by this scheme is based on the analysis of property rights and institutions, the interpretation effect is completely different from the general synthesis of the above factors when solving the Needham problem.