I don't think it is a secret that the WEST has come up with every viable component of technology during the last 300 years, or so....

To those of you whom are literate in English - I submit the following. Those with an inquiring mind; you will find opinions expressed here quite interesting, informative and illuminating. Those less gifted, the lemmings, that populate this board will want to pass on silently to more agreeable and easily understood material.

Remember when evaluating the advancement of cultures, to place it in the proper scope of time.
While western culture has reached a peak in the past couple of hundred years, it has recently begun to start sliding slowly backwards.
Our political system (being dominated by special interests and opinions being manipulated by media) is showing its age.
Our economic system (with the development of ever more complex financial instruments and reliance on debt) is showing its flaws as well.
Our industrial and transportation infrastructure (driven by oil) is just beginning to be affected.Yet we are still smug in the assurance that we are the "greatest civilization on earth". Or perhaps, the greatest civilization, ever.
Some of the comments I see -- that Chinese are genetically unable to innovate because they have been selected over millennium to be conformists -- wow.

In addition, the Chinese have really done NOTHING but copy/steal what has been developed in the West (and Japan), in terms of global technology.

All I can say is, you don't know the Chinese. The first thing you do if you want to surpass another culture, is copy everything they do right, improve on it, and sell it back to them. The Chinese understand this -- at the molecular level.
-- Million-Year Picnic

Anyway, one of the leading scholars in the field is Kenneth Pommeranz, who in "The Great Divergence" subscirbes European ascendancy over Asia to the acquisition of material resources in the New World which enabled the Industrial Revolution. The IR then drove European merchants to seek new markets for their surplus, and said merchants were backed by the willingness of Euorpean states to open markets by force. The (not all that overwhelming, but substantive) advantages in military technology--especially naval technology--that the Industrial Revolution afforded Europe allowed them to do so. Once the markets were open opium acted as a literal narcotic upon the Chinese working classes, murdering productivity. China was thus forced to attempt to modernize while facing a major drug problem *and* draining its treasury to pay the indemnities it owed from the Opium Wars and other imperialist ventures.

Ironically, Europeans found the New World (which remember gave them the jump, development-wise on Asia in the first place) because they were looking for direct trade routes to Asia. Asians did not seek direct trade routes to Europe because there was nothing in Europe that any Asian governments deemed were worth mounting voyages of exploration for.
In any case, Western Asia (Europe)'s ascendancy over East Asia seems to have lasted all of 250 years, if that, and in my opinion now that China's resources are wedded to capitalist forms of production it is just a matter of time until East Asia is the world's dominant region.
- dbp1954

....the Mongols. The Mongols are, in my opinion, the single most influential human force in the history of the world prior to the Industrial Revolution. Not only were they one of the, if not the most successful land army the world has ever seen, founding the largest land empire formed to date, but all historical accounts suggest their brutality has only been mildly exaggerated and China bore the brunt.
The Song Dynasty had developed such technologies as gunpowder, movable type, and hydraulics as early as the 12th Century. The Northern capital of the Song, Bianjing, fell to the Jurchen, a neighboring tribe to the Mongols, and over the next 20 years, the Song retreated South until the Mongols came in and finished them off, founding the Yuan Dynasty.
The Yuan, described by a relatively apolitical outsider in the form of Marco Polo, were quite represive towards the native Chinese, largely halting the scientific and engineering developments of the previous era. The Yuan eventually fell apart, of course, leading to a new native dynasty in the form of the Ming, but China never recaptured anything close to the scientific advancement it achieved under the Song.
-- pacobird

The traditional social organization of China mitigates against innovative dynamism. Chinese society has always been dominated by landowners and bureaucrats, two classes that don't get much collective benefit from technological innovation. European societies have always integrated a capital class - merchants, bankers, traders, artisans - to a much greater degree, and they consequently have enjoyed more social prestige and political power, and this is the class that benefits most from technological development (and thus has the most incentive to not only support it but to systemize it). Add in the quasi-religious reverence for stasis of China and the much greater emphasis on the significance of the individual in Western societies, and the end results are not at all surprising.
-- Planetary_Eulogy

Needham devoted the remainder of his life to, on the one hand, documenting how technologically far ahead China had been for millennia when compared to the West, and on the other hand, striving to understand why Europe suddenly jumped in front -- a monumental tectonic shift that dominates the reality of globalization to this day.

I think that act may be over. Asia seems to have seen that remaining competitive in the global economy boiled down to a simple disonance between technology and education. The U.S., by comparison, seems like a lumbering old man with alzheimers-unable to see that its educational and social paradigm is stuck in the late 1890s. (We took from 1890 to 1968 to be leading the way, then from 1968-2008 to find our way back to 1890). Soon scholars will be wondering how the society that invented open heart surgery and the internet and put the first person on the moon was sumarily leapfrogged by Europe and Asia.
-- natesmith124

Foot binding.
The side effect of massively mistreating/torturing the majority of parents (who were actually doing parenting) had all kinds of psychological fallout that totally retarded the national psyche's interest in advancement. Something similar happened to Islam with its increasingly brutal treatment of women from the 1400s onward.

Check out the work's of Lloyd DeMause at psychohistory.com: It's decidely not for the squeamish, but it does present much convincing evidence that societal advancement flows from improvements in childrearing and not the other way around.''
-- No Idea

China in the late Ming dynasty (i.e., 16th and first-half 17th century) was still vibrant, heterodox, and innovative, with widespread interest and contacts with the West and the world in general. So any theories that posit that the decline began before then are bunk. Sure, the government was failing in the late Ming, but dynastic change was nothing new.

It was the Manchu conquest in 1644 that changed everything. The new Qing regime brought censorship in China to new heights, seeking both to control the Chinese populace and co-opt their traditions. Men were forced to dress alike and cut their hair the same way (i.e., in the Manchu style), with a similar set of restrictions for women.

Compare the early 15th-century Yongle Dadian encyclopedia to the 18th-century Siku Quanshu project. Both are massive undertakings designed to promote the legitimacy of the current ruler and a degree of ideological conformity, with one crucial difference: the Ming compilation included "heretical" texts and material written in colloquial Chinese, while the Qing project was, and is, a highly-selective, carefully-edited library of orthodox texts written in literary Chinese. Note also that the Manchu rulers not only stifled Chinese innovation through this kind of orthodoxy, but they also eradicated anything that threatened it -- the Yongle Dadian survives today only in fragmentary form, a tiny proportion of the original whole.
-- rasmus

The printing press played a huge role in the European science and math revolution

First thing -- the literacy rate shot up, because now the Bible could be mass-produced, and Christian people wanted to read the Bible, so they had a motivation to learn to read.

Second thing -- all previous Greek, Indian, and Arab math could be mass produced in volumes translated into Latin.

So -- suddenly Europe has the highest percentage of literate people in the world, and for the first time in the world, works in geometry, algebra and number theory are in print and available to scholars in a single language.

China was not in that loop at all.
-- Silenced

1) It is only in the last 3 or 4 centuries that the "rest of the world" -the West made some really spectacular advances in science and technology.
2) Creative thought and science usually flourish in periods of relative prosperity. For the West much of that prosperity came in the post 16th century from the colonies. For much of the last 1000 -1500 years Asia has been preoccupied with warfare invasions,and colonization. Enslaved cultures are generally not so creative or innovative because (A) they are robbed of wealth (B) they are suppressed.
3) It is only 60 years or so since the East has been able to free itself from the shackles of colonization and the resultant extreme poverty. Given the burgeoning populations in those parts it will be extremely difficult (but not impossible) to keep pace. The fact is they ARE keeping pace and outsmarting us in our game.
4) It is naive and stupid to think that these resurgent nations will sit idly by the next 1000 years to come up with the next big idea in renewable energy or some such thing. Complacency has been our bane. Remember: the Japs taught us how to make fuel efficient cars. Did we learn? No, we did the creative thing - we built SUVs and Humvees. While we continue to gloat on our 20th century achievements do not be surprized if the next wave of innovations come marked "Originally designed in China". Wonder who, then, will "copy" whom?
-- Lodestone