Guess I'm somewhat ignorant about history, so maybe this is a stupid question. But I've been wondering about this: Until about 500 years ago, I guess China was

Guess I'm somewhat ignorant about history, so maybe this is a stupid question. But I've been wondering about this: Until about 500 years ago, I guess China was ahead of Europe culturally, economically, scientifically etc, but then Europe raced ahead. How much does this have to do with the printing press? How easy is it to use a traditional printing press with Chinese characters compared to the Latin alphabet? Obviously, access and spread of information must have a lot to do with a society's development. Did the traditional printing press cause information (i.e. books and newspapers) to become cheap and widespread in Europe, but not in China? Writing Chinese characters on a computer is relatively quick and easy. I wonder if this has something to do with the rapid development that we're seeing in China now? Some might say that embracing capitalism is why China is developing so fast now, and I guess that is partially true. However, wasn't China kinda capitalist before the Communist revolution? It didn't develop that much back then. Edit: I found a bit of info on this on the Wikipedia page for the printing press. According to that "a single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press