5000 years of chinese civilization ? Really ?

[yoruba]

On page 188 of the aforementioned book, Simon Winchester writes : "Needham pointed out that in every century the Chinese dreamed up nearly fifteen new scientific ideas - a pace of inventiveness unmatched by the world's other great civilizations, including the Greeks."
Doesn't it strike you as unbalanced and unfair to compare ancient Greece to China ? Coming from a Westerner it may even sound pretentious to think that the tiny confederation of rocky islands that was Greece was great enough as a civilization to play in the same weight category as the subcontinent that is China. It would be as if an Irish person was telling an Indian "Wow it's amazing, India has contributed more to world science and culture than Ireland ! How did you do it ?" Not just pretentious but also sarcastically provocative and disdainful. And that's exactly the way I feel Needham or Winchester are saying it when they mention that China came up with more scientific ideas per century even than the Greeks ! Ancient Greece was stupendous, but not enough for each Greek person to be worth 10 or 20 Chinese individuals. How condescending does that sound ?
Ancient Greece with all its colonies, although never politically unified, had a land area of approximately 350,000 square km. That's a bit smaller than the province of Yunnan. That's about 30x smaller than the People's Republic of China.
The Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, or Egyptians lived on territories that were all comparable to Chinese provinces. The Roman Empire at its maximum extent under Trajan reached a size of approximately 5,000,000 km2, about the same as the contemporary Han Empire. That would make for a better comparison except that China was about twice more populous than the Roman Empire, and so had twice the workforce, twice as many intellectuals, and so on.
The only way to compare fairly China's massive historical population with the West would be to take all Europe as far as the Urals and all the Middle East including Persia. By doing so I doubt that the Chinese would still be unmatched by their inventiveness. It's always important to look at the per capita figure. Two minds always produce more than one.

I don't agree with you here. The population trend during the peak of the Roman Empire was comparable and even higher than that of its contemporary Chinese counterpart. I don't know where you are getting your numbers from but here are mine.

I can't add links yet because I don't have enough posts yet, but you can find these quotes form Wikipedia by typing in "Classical demography" and "Han Dynasty"

"There are many estimates of the population for the Roman Empire, that range from 45 million to 120 million. Most modern estimates range from 55 to 65 million."

These figures include Greece of course.

"In China's first known nationwide census taken in 2 CE, the population was registered as having 57,671,400 individuals in 12,366,470 households."

Though Wikipedia has a dubious reputation as a source, the figures presented are backed up with citations to scholarly works. If Roman Empire's peak population figure is 120,000,000; doesn't that turn the table on your argument? If you want to include the population of Parthia, the rest of the Middle East, and Europe (I don't see why, however, because most not under Roman control were unsophisticated barbarians [relative to contemporary civilizations of course]), that's at least another 50-100 million, and therefore more than quadruple the population of Han China.

You made good points about the misconceptions of China as the most ancient civilization--it was something I was dubious was about ever since I became interested in Chinese history and I'm sure we aren't the only ones--but you cannot deny that China was the world's leader in science from at least the first century up until the Renaissance in Europe. Ironically, it was three crucial Chinese inventions that led to their humiliation by the west. Without the invention of paper and block printing, Europe would not have been able to disseminate its ideas so quickly; and without the compass and gunpowder, Europe would not have been able to navigate the world and defeat every people it encountered.