The Chinese had a 5000 YEAR head start over the rest of the world and yet have nothing to show for it today......
Come to think of it, the Chinese have not invented anything of significance for centuries. All the Chinese can crow about is gunpowder, paper, printing press etc which was literally eons ago...
Yes, let's see the timeline of the 4 great Chinese inventions:
- Compass (pre-dynastic, 4,000+ years ago)
- Paper (Han Dynasty, 2,000+ years ago)
- Gunpowder (Song Dynasty, 1,200+ years ago)
- Printing press (Song Dynasty, 1,200+ years ago)
The early invention of the compass facilitated the expansion of Chinese civilisation to cover vast land areas. However, Chinese didn't realise its full functionality in oceanic navigation until Ming Dynasty (500+ years ago). The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British took the lead.
China invented modern paper (ancient papyrus was invented by Egypt 4,000+ years ago). However, go to a bookshop today and look at printed in China books. Chinese papers are among the lowest qualities imaginable today. The top quality papers are from Japan and Britain.
After the invention of gunpowder, China simply used it for fireworks and arson sabotage. Other countries learned about it and make cannons and bombs, to sell to China or to invade China with. What a plonker!
China has invented the printing press first but was handicapped by what it prides its civilisation on, the set of several thousand calligraphically designed characters. The set of movable types to use with the press was unmovable, i.e. not portable or miniaturisable as they filled a whole room. The west with 26 letters, 10 digits and some punctuation marks, invented the true moveable type press (Johannes Gutenberg, Germany, 600+ years ago) leading to the typewriter and to the computer keyboard of today.
The computerisation of keyboards saved Chinese from the seemingly perpetual exclusion from use of personal typing machine. And with much thanks to Japanese having borrowed and stuck with Chinese characters as the main part of their writing system, the computer keyboard was shortly developed to be able to handle Chinese character inputs.