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.