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First of all, I am of Chinese descent. I grew up in Taiwan. That does not make me an expert on the subject, of course. I could be wrong.

1. Movable typing in China was inventing around 1040 A.D. [1], about 400 years prior to Guttemberg. It uses ceramic materials.

2. Confucianism, much like Christianity in the West and Islam in the Middle East, is not uncontested. And Confucius is not he greatest philosopher of all time.

I think this article is quite interesting. It's a very good summary of the West's understanding of "China", and it's a very good example of Chinese government rewriting history to suit its needs. I wouldn't buy much into it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type

Christianity started in the Middle East, it's not just a western thing.

I think it's interesting that technically Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all worship the same god. Yet they hate each other so much.

Your making a sweeping statement there, they don't all hate each other only a select few feel the need to discriminate against other religions.

The past thousand years of history in Europe and constant internecine warfare beg to differ.

To amplify what impendia said, Hiragana[1] is mostly used for participles and conjugation. Most words are written with the Kanji, which are very similar to Chinese Hanzi. Japanese printers didn't actually have a job that was any easier than Chinese printers. I won't say that have an ideogram writing system wasn't a disadvantage, but it wasn't a huge one and China's vibrant literary scene shows that they could overcome it.

The emphasis of the Chinese exam system on the classics was also a problem, though having a bureaucracy selected by what was essentially an IQ test was a pretty huge advantage in general. But intelligence is no guarantee of probity, and by the time of the opium war 25% of the Chinese GDP was being collected in taxes... but only a fifth of that was going into government coffers. Top down control matched with an absence of credible external threats was a recipe for corruption.

In Japan, by contrast, you had the Shogunate which was suzerain over Japan but only sovereign over a relatively small portion of it. The Tokugawas worked hard to prevent the Daimyos from taxing their peasants too hard (as a means of restricting their power), which resulted in a lot of commercial growth in the pre-Meiji period. In the modern West we have methods of taxation that are generally[2] fairly efficient in terms of transferring wealth from the citizens to the state with not much loss, and the things that the money is spent on are fairly useful. These things are far less true of taxation back in the 18th century.

And you could look at lots of other issues too. Like the fact that the Qing dynasty was still viewed as a bunch of foreign barbarians by many meant that they had to be very traditional, and didn't have enough legitimacy to spend on modernization.

[1] Katanana, the other syllabary, is used for non-Japanese sounds such as those made by the wind or Americans.

[2] Except the US's corporate income tax.

And you could look at lots of other issues too. Like the fact that the Qing dynasty was still viewed as a bunch of foreign barbarians by many meant that they had to be very traditional, and didn't have enough legitimacy to spend on modernization.

Not just the Qing. China's entire history for the last 2,000 years is basically one of an agricultural society being repeatedly conquered and subjugated by foreign invaders. For a long time it was pastoral "barbarians" from the north, but then it was Japan and the European powers.

There are all kinda of theories on why the West became hegemonic instead of China, but China's geography likely had something to do with it. Raids from the north resulted in constant upheaval and frequent wars. Hence the building of the Great Wall as an futile attempt to keep the northern invaders out.

Sometimes. Sui, Tang, Qin, and Zhou fit that pattern. But the Ming, Tang, Song, and Han all started when someone led a successful rebellion or otherwise conquered China from within.

As far as I can tell the Great Wall was more about stopping raids than invasions.

Sui, Tang, Qin, and Zhou fit that pattern.

Can't forget the Jin, Liao, Xia, and Yuan.

Also, another geographic factor I forgot to mention was the fact that much of China's land is just unsuitable for the kind of modern farming technology that was developed in the west. (Try running a harvesting combine over this: http://www.jacobsexposure.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/MJP... or, for another matter, this: http://i.imwx.com/web/multimedia/images/content/China_drough... )

South China is too hilly and has too much water, meanwhile North China has never had enough water.

The relatively poor rice/grain farming productivity in China was a pretty major obstacle to technological progress. Too much of the population had to rely on subsistence farming, and famine was a constant threat from time immemorial up until about the 1980s.

> The Japanese identified the problem and created a vocalic language from Chinese, the kana.

This is not quite accurate, kana are basically just an alphabet (two alphabets actually) that can be used to write Japanese. To my knowledge kana were adopted to the spoken language rather than the other way around.

> The reason Japanese stated running circles around Chinese and humiliated them.(Chinese and Japanese hate each other so much)

Is it? Perhaps you are right -- but your argument strikes me as somewhat implausible.

First of all, the Japanese were extremely isolationist until the Meiji era (1860's); they didn't start to "run circles" around China until close to 1900.

So I suppose that you are claiming that many Japanese books were published using only kana in this time period? Contemporary Japanese books, except those written for young children, use a combination of kana and Chinese characters. I believe the same has been true since 1860 (i.e. the start of the Meiji era), so I'm not sure that the existence of kana can be responsible for Japan's rise to power.

Please correct me if I have said anything incorrect.

You're correct.

Japanese isn't a phonetic language as such, it's syllables, with only the vowels and 'n' allowed to be alone, the rest are a consonant follow with a vowel (although the vowel is often omitted in speech), and there aren't very many of the. Therefore there are a zillion homonyms (and puns) and a lot of inherent ambiguity, which is addressed by context and, as you note, except for children, using full kanji (adopted Chinese ideographs). Publications for older children frequently use kanji with small kana to the right side called furigana for the kanji they're still learning.

That said, as I understand it there are many fewer kanji that literate Japanese need to learn compare to the Chinese, about 1,800 by the time they graduate from high school.

Japan also wasn't extremely isolationist until 4 decades into the Tokugawa Shogunate, so it's really a period of 1641 to 1853, and as Wikipedia puts it, correctly to my knowledge, it "maintained limited-scale trade and diplomatic relations with China, Korea, the Ryukyu Islands and the Netherlands".

The printing press was certainly an accelerant but itself was a culmination of centuries of progress in Europe not shared elsewhere. Other alphabets and alpha-syllabaries in Eastern Europe, India and the Islamic world didn't lead to printing because they lacked the maturing technology and tradition of movable type that Europe had in the centuries before Gutenberg (cf. Medieval letter tiles, Prufening dedicatory inscription, etc.). Even in Gutenberg's time there were other goldsmiths making nearly identical advances in Holland and France.

More importantly, two centuries before Gutenberg, scholars in Western Europe had thrown off the shackles of believing antiquity had all the answers, something many parts of the world still struggle with. This is sometimes credited to the rediscovery of Aristotle but the Persians and Arabs knew Aristotle and never made that leap. Instead Aristotle is simply another accelerant. What actually led Europe (and specifically Western Europe) to science was the development, from Catholic cathedral schools to pseudo-independent, credential granting institutions of learning which encouraged adding to previous knowledge and, because of this, specialization. Six hundred years before Gutenberg these proto-universities had already formalized specialized programs with separate credentials for studies in theology, philosophy and medicine.

Previous academies that investigated the natural world were simply not resilient institutions; tending to decline under weak central rulers (Gondeshapur in Iran, Baghdad's House of Wisdom), be obliterated in war (House of Wisdom again, Plato's Academy) or fade after the passing of famous founders. Many also lacked a professional faculty and credential granting, further limiting long term innovation.

Western Europe's fractured political map and separation of religious power in the papacy worked against these tendencies. The independence and progress of local universities was always to the benefit of local rulers and at the same time the universities enjoyed an association with the church that helped protect them from both obliteration after military conquest and excessive domination by the state. This independence has to be one of the biggest keys because China's Imperial Academy had both amazing resilience and degree granting so it's inability to develop any kind of formal science has to be blamed on the strong subjugation to the central government which used it strictly to train civil servants. The most learned men of China were interested in the natural world, they engaged in scientism (cf. Shen Kuo's proto-geomorphism 800 years before Lyell) but they were essentially all self-taught hobbyists.

The Chinese were printing for hundreds of years before Europe picked it up[1]. If you're making a single plate to reproduce a page, it actually doesn't matter if it's characters or an alphabet. Same with moveable type, it's more of a pain than an alphabet, but you've already got such a front-loaded process that it's not that much worse, the same economics apply (1 copy is very expensive, 1,000 not much more).

I mean, don't get me wrong, the characters are ridiculous and I'm very intrigued to see how typing evolves in China (currently, type pinyin and select which of the several characters are spelled that way from a list -- do they switch to straight pinyin eventually?), but printing was alive and well in China way before the west, same with gunpowder. China was technologically superior from 500-1700 or so. If you want to point to something, point to the coal-fired steam engine.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Inventions

There are so many things wrong with your comments on kana and the Japanese language that I don't even know where to begin. Not only were kana invented hundreds of years before the Gutenberg press, but they were created because Japanese and Chinese are in completely different language families. Because Japanese is an agglutinative language, using characters just doesn't make sense with its grammar. That's the real reason why kana started to be used for writing Japanese.

Also, even though kana were used, that didn't mean kanji weren't used as well. If you look at Japanese works from any period in history, including the 1800s, 1900s, and now, you can see that kanji are everywhere.

A fantastic book to read on this topic is "A world lit only by fire" by William Manchester. He also makes the case that Europe emerged from superstition because the Pope declared the world to be flat just as Magellan circumnavigated the globe, and the printing press permitted millions to learn about it. The age of myth and superstition was rapidly replaced by the Enlightenment.

Update: as has been pointed out below, Manchester overstated his case. It was still an enjoyable read some 16 years ago, and I still agree with the idea that the printing press - by disseminating news and knowledge at speed - undermined the prevailing authority of the day.

Thanks for the reference. I will buy it.

Do you have a reference for that papal quote that you can link?

I say this because I was under the strong impression no one believed the earth to be flat. Yet the myth persists, much to my annoyance.

If you can't back that up, could you please remove it, to avoid spreading rumour?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

Of course, if a pope actually did say such a thing, I cheerfully withdraw my comment.

Note: I just checked the amazon reviews of that book. They claim it is rife with error.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/031...

I cited the book as reference ... I didn't claim anything else.

I'm suggesting that, if you can't find a reference on the internet, then the book is wrong, and you're helping spread the flat earth myth that is common in America.

Which Pope would that be? Wikipedia only mentions there was some sort of 8th Century controversy, but what little survives doesn't touch on the shape of the earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#Early_Middle_Ages Hard to imagine this wouldn't be mentioned. I also noticed the reviews and reception of A World Lit Only by Fire are scathing, and if what they cite is correct, appropriately so.

It's my understanding its shape as a sphere was well accepted for a very long time, e.g. Wikipedia, citing a 1995 German PhD dissertation says "A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that 'since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth.'"

See further https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth or the book I just found, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Flat-Earth-Columbus-Historia...), about how modern era "historians" created out of whole cloth the idea that it was thought to be flat back then. See the latter Wikipedia article over the issue with Columbus, which had to do with his incorrect estimation of the earth's circumference. If not for the convenient location of "the new world", he and his crews would have perished since he had the distance to the Far East off by a factor of 4. While his contemporaries weren't exactly sure of the circumference, they knew his voyage as envisioned would have ended in ruin.

If I remember correctly, according to Umberto Eco the flat Earth myth (attributing this stance to catholic church) was made up by Darwinists in the heat of the debate over evolution theory. It wasn't true, but they'd throw everything in the kitchen sink at their opponent for propaganda purposes.

I disagree with this, I think it's a fallacy that poor circulation of written works contributed meaningfully to China's stagnation. Yes, books were more expensive, but higher learning (and related, the civil service exam system) was still one of the strong points of Chinese society throughout history.

My opinion (having majored in China Studies in university) is that China's biggest handicap was that the regional geography made it very easy for pastoral peoples from the Central Asian steppes to ride in on their horses and conquer the Yangtze and Yellow River basins. This happened over and over again, and the cycle of repeated war and subjugation by foreign tribes, kept China from making more significant advances in technology or stabilizing internally enough to focus on expanding their reach outward. To this day instability and unrest is the bogeyman of Chinese society, that's why they're always talking about maintaining "order" and "harmony."

> the cycle of repeated war and subjugation by foreign tribes, kept China from making more significant advances in technology or stabilizing internally enough to focus on expanding their reach outward

Very like medieval Europe, isn't it? What did break that cycle in Europe?

(I remember from my school's history classes the explanation that nations and empires grew over the entire territory - what clearly didn't happen; and that the more war-liking population were conquered - quite a contradiction. Also, it happened before Europe got rich, not after, thus that argument is invalid.)

Europe was a little different in that no single power was really able to conquer it all after the fall of the Roman Empire. The political fragmentation and diversity of Europe may have actually contributed to the growth of commerce, shifting the balance of power away from aristocratic rulers and toward the merchant class.

Europe also has better farming land and more stable waterways than China, which allowed more efficient use of farming technology, keeping famine at bay and allowing the region to support a larger urban population, which had sufficient free leisure time for innovation. Whereas drought and famine were constant threats, and subsistence farming was an all-consuming effort for most people in China up until the late 20th century.

You said like now the Chinese considering only Confucius, with no mention of Lao-Tzu, Sun Tzu and other brilliant philosophers. The evidence of Chinese lag is not they consider Confucius the "greatest philosopher of all time", in fact it was some western media said that. The Chinese surely lagged behind after the Age of Discovery, but what you said is not the reason.

The whole part about japanese is completely wrong. Dont talk pretending you have any clue.