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China HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY
Pre-1949 Patterns
Until the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), China was a world leader in
technology and scientific discovery. Many Chinese inventions--paper
and printing, gunpowder, porcelain, the magnetic compass, the
sternpost rudder, and the lift lock for canals--made major
contributions to economic growth in the Middle East and Europe. The
outside world remained uninformed about Chinese work in agronomy,
pharmacology, mathematics, and optics. Scientific and technological
activity in China dwindled, however, after the fourteenth century.
It became increasingly confined to little-known and marginal
individuals who differed from Western scientists such as Galileo or
Newton in two primary ways: they did not attempt to reduce the
regularities of nature to mathematical form, and they did not
constitute a community of scholars, criticizing each others' work
and contributing to an ongoing program of research. Under the last
two dynasties, the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911),
China's ruling elite intensified its humanistic concentration on
literature, the arts, and public administration and regarded
science and technology as either trivial or narrowly utilitarian
(see The Confucian Legacy
, ch. 3).
Data as of July 1987
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