From New York Times: Historical Tremors
<p>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/opinion/15winchester.html
</p><p><br></p><p>IT is a cruel and poignant certainty that the children who died in
the wreckage of their school during the earthquake this week in
Dujiangyan, China, knew all too well that their country once led the
world in the knowledge of the planet’s seismicity. </p><p>They would
have been taught, and proudly, that almost 2,000 years ago an
astronomer named Chang Heng invented the world’s first seismoscope. It
was a bizarrely imagined creation, with its centerpiece a large bronze
vessel surrounded by eight dragons, each holding a sphere in its mouth.
</p><p>A complex system of internal levers ensured that if an
earthquake ever disturbed the vessel, a ball would drop from a dragon’s
care into the mouth of a bronze frog positioned underneath. By
observing which dragon had dropped its ball, Chang Heng could ascertain
the location of the quake. And always, as the emperor for whom Chang
Heng fashioned the device noted, the earthquakes came from the
mountains in the west, where Dujiangyan lies.</p><p>As we watch with
mounting melancholy the devastation from Sichuan, a question lingers,
and troublingly. Why, if the Chinese had come to know so much about
earthquakes so early on in their immensely long history, were they
never able to minimize the effects of the world’s contortions — to at
least the degree that America has? Why did they leave the West to
become leaders in the field, and leave themselves to become mired, time
and again, in the kind of tragic events that we are witnessing this
week?</p><p>The question applies to very much more than the science of
earthquakes. In almost every area of technology the Chinese were once
supreme, without competition. The stirrup, so hugely important in peace
and war, was invented by the Chinese. Printing, gunpowder, the use of
the compass — the three inventions that Francis Bacon once said defined
the modern world — are all thought to have been first made in China. So
too, many think, were vaccination, toilet paper, segmental arch
bridges, iron chains and perhaps chess — the list seems endless.</p><p>
And yet, in the 16th century China’s innovative energies inexplicably
withered away, and modern science became the virtual monopoly of the
West. There had been any number of Chinese Euclids and Archimedes but
there was never to be a Chinese Newton or Galileo. The realm fell
steadily behind, century by century; it became impoverished, backward
and prey to the caprices of nature.</p><p>There is a peculiar paradox
in the Sichuan disaster. Dujiangyan is known across the nation as the
site of one of China’s greatest ancient wonders. In 256 B.C. an
engineer named Li Bing, concerned about the catastrophic annual
flooding of the Min River, completed a huge water diversion and
irrigation scheme. It involved cutting a long trench through a granite
mountainside — achieved by the patient process of burning grass
bonfires on top of the rocks and pouring cold water until the granite
cracked. It took decades, but Li Bing’s 2,300-year-old project still
stands less than a mile from the town’s ruined school, and it still
works.</p><p>And yet, did the Chinese continue with their early
expertise in flood prevention? Just as with Chang Heng’s seismic
mastery, Li Bing’s expertise counted for nothing; year upon year,
thousands of Chinese die in immense inundations in the great rivers
that course across the country; some 400 dams sustained damage in this
week’s quake.</p><p>Historians have long debated why the Chinese so
signally failed to exploit their early promise. Lack of internal
competition, some suggest. Others blame the long-held central ambition
of every young Chinese man to become a Confucian mandarin, a
bureaucrat, rather than an engineer or scientist. </p><p>Not a few
others, however — admirers of China and optimists in the main — say
that in the long sweep of Chinese history, a mere 400 or 500 dark,
non-scientific years are a mere blip, a hiccup, and that China’s
innovative energies are now roaring back, with the universities and
scientific institutions brimming as they did back in the golden ages of
the great dynasties.</p><p>That had better be the case. China, in its
headlong attempts to modernize, has often demonstrated a dismayingly
cavalier attitude toward the well-being of its people: skyscrapers are
built with little attention to safety standards and are invariably far
from earthquake-resistant; huge dams — not least the monstrosity that
has so ruined the Three Gorges of the Yangtze — are erected in a
slapdash fashion; subways, like the system burrowing through the
waterlogged alluvium beneath Shanghai, are built with incautious haste;
freeway tunnels are bored through earthquake fault zones. </p><p>If
the country does not occasionally stand back and pause for breath, then
its future — at least so far as nature’s occasional moments of seismic
madness are concerned — will continue to be marked by calamity. Until
this week Dujiangyan was a place of which China could be proud; today
its wreckage stands as a tragic monument to a culture that turned its
back on its remarkable and glittering history.</p>