Needham's work has been criticised by some scholars who assert that it has a strong inclination to exaggerate List of Chinese inventions and has an excessive propensity to assume a Chinese origin for the wide range of objects his work covered - wikipedia 
Pierre-Yves Manguin writes, for instance:
J Needham's (1971) monumental work on Chinese Nautical offers by far the most scholarly synthesis on the subjects of Chinese shipbuilding and navigation.His propensity to view the Chinese as the initiators of all things and his constant references to the superiority of Chinese over the rest of the world's techniques does at times detract from his argument.
In another vein of criticism, Andre Gunder Frank's ''Re-Orient'' argues that despite Needham's contributions in the field of Chinese technological history, he still struggled to break free from his preconceived notions of European exceptionalism. Re-Orient criticizes Needham for his Eurocentric assumptions borrowed from Marx and the presupposition of Needham's famous Grand Question that science was a uniquely Western phenomenon.
Frank observes:
Alas, it was also originally Needham's Marxist and Weberian point of departure. As Needham found more and more evidence about science and technology in China, he struggled to liberate himself from his Eurocentric original sin, which he had inherited directly from Marx, as Cohen also observes.But Needham never quite succeeded, perhaps because his concentration on China prevented him from sufficiently revising his still ethnocentric view of Europe itself.
T.H. Barrett asserts in ''The Woman Who Discovered Printing'' that Needham was unduly critical of Buddhism, describing it as having 'tragically played a part in strangling the growth of Chinese science,' to which Needham readily conceded in a conversation a few years later. Barrett also criticizes Needham's favoritism and uncritical evaluation of Taoism in Chinese technological history:
He had a tendency— not entirely justified in the light of more recent research— to think well of Taoism, because he saw it as playing a part that could not be found elsewhere in Chinese civilization. The mainstream school of thinking of the bureaucratic Chinese elite, or 'Confucianism' (another problematic term) in his vocabulary, seemed to him to be less interested in science and technology, and to have 'turned its face away from Nature.' Ironically, the dynasty that apparently turned away from printing from 706 till its demise in 907 was as Taoist as any in Chinese history, though perhaps its 'state Taoism' would have seemed a corrupt and inauthentic business to Needham.
Referring to Needham's work as a sinologist, Daiwie Fu, in the essay "On ''Mengxi bitan__s World of Marginalities and 'South-pointing Needles': Fragment Translation vs. Contextual Tradition", argues for contextual translations instead of fragmented ones, criticising the faults of Needham in particular.
Justin Yifu Lin argues against Needham's premise that China's early adoption of modern socioeconomic institutions contributed heavily to its technological advancement. Lin contends that technological advancements at this time were largely separate from economic circumstance, and that the effects of these institutions on technological advancement were indirect.
# See also