Three recent collections of scholarship on science and technology in China strongly suggest that the Needham paradigm can be put to rest in more than one way. The oftenstated question, first investigated by Joseph Needham, wonders why China, with a long tradition of scientific practices, did not develop "modern" science. According to Needham, it was Chinese traditional bureaucracy and feudalism that hindered a "true" development of modem science as seen in Europe. Although this statement is easily critiqued as teleological and Eurocentric, it has shaped much of the writing on Chinese science and technology in the past decades. Modern science, if it came to China, had to be imposed or adopted. The Chinese role in modern science could onlv be passive. The Needham model, informed by the trajectory of modern Western science, also imposes an anachronistic interpretation of science and technology in premodern China. Recent scholarship, as demonstrated by the three edited volumes discussed here. has attempted to go beyond the Needham paradigm by posing a new set of methodological approaches and research questions. It shows a more nuanced understanding of China's
