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

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