China failed to maintain its technological lead, and a similar failure throughout Asia to take advantage of the early exposure to that head start transformed precocity into a false dawn. Perversely, Asian improvements and adaptations of current (twentieth- to twenty-first-century) Western-developed technology are taken as further signs of lack of creativity.
Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
asia, china, eurocentrism, europe, historiography, history, technology