What caused the scientific revolution not to be born in China with a long cultural history?

The fundamental reason of scientific and technological revolution is not only the need of production, but also the gestation of culture. Why didn't China, which has a long cultural history, have a scientific revolution?

China's ancient holistic view of the universe holds that everything in the world obeys the universal law of the universe as a whole, that is, destiny. This law dominates the inanimate world and the living world, dominates nature and society, and even dominates people and gods, but it only belongs to the universe as a whole. Fate and human relations are regarded as one, which can only be realized through self-cultivation, not through experience and practice.

From the perspective of modern system theory, China's traditional view of nature belongs to the system view of absolute holism. It believes that the universe is a unified whole; But it can only be understood as an absolute whole, and it is impossible to understand it from its components. It not only opposes the use of analytical methods, but also takes the natural world other than human beings as the object of understanding and decomposes the natural world into various parts to understand; It is also opposed to adopting a comprehensive method to summarize the overall law from the specific laws of each part. It denies the existence of the intermediate level law of the universe system and the inevitable connection between "fate" and experience.

China's ancient science and technology is characterized by practicality and experience, but it lacks regular knowledge beyond abstract thinking and perceptual experience. Under the restriction of the traditional view of nature, China ancient science will inevitably leave a blank area of theoretical science between philosophical speculation with strong speculative nature and production experience and technical science full of practical spirit. This traditional thought holds that all empirical science is directly controlled by "destiny" and "secret". Therefore, whether it is a technician, a scientist who serves production in a down-to-earth way, or a philosopher who ponders the mysteries of the universe, it is necessary to learn theoretical science and even logical theory.

Although China's traditional view of the whole system of nature contains profound thoughts and will bring valuable enlightenment to later science, its blank area in theoretical science has blocked the only way for China's ancient science to evolve into modern science.

Compared with China's ancient view of nature, the ancient Greek philosophy of nature, which represents the core of western ancient traditional culture, insists on the holistic view of understanding the world, just like China's ancient view of nature, but its holistic view is not absolute, but on the premise of distinguishing nature from human beings and acknowledging that human beings can understand the whole nature by knowing various intermediate laws. Although the intermediate law is still vague in ancient Greek natural science, which makes the view of nature based on it bring great speculation, it quietly sets up a channel from ancient science to modern science, such as logical method and axiomatic method.

In fact, the brilliant achievements of ancient science and technology in China fully show how rich ideological nutrition and broad living space China traditional culture has provided for the development of science and technology. Due to the limited productivity of feudal society, the importance of theoretical science has not been fully demonstrated, so the defects of China's ancient view of nature are not enough to have a decisive impact on materialized science and technology.

However, when the actual strength of China's ancient science and technology was far ahead of the world, due to the lack of intermediate theoretical science, the backward situation, which determined the potential strength of the scientific and technological revolution in the next era-the super-age factor in spiritual science and technology, had begun to take shape.

China science and technology from leading to lagging behind is not only a transformation process in modern history. This process has been lurking in the feudal society of China for a long time, and gradually emerged with the development of history. However, the backward and conservative side of China's traditional culture bears an important responsibility for this-this not only refers to the view of nature, but also includes backward and conservative ideas in all aspects.

People must remember that papermaking, printing, compass and gunpowder played an important role in China's scientific and technological achievements in the modern European scientific and technological revolution and the great changes of the whole society: the compass helped the emerging bourgeoisie in Europe to open up new territory and provide sufficient natural resources and living space; Papermaking and printing have become important means to spread science and advanced ideas widely; Gunpowder has become a material force for the western bourgeoisie to destroy feudal forces and the western civilization to defeat the eastern civilization. The reason why China, the hometown of the above four inventions, failed to use them to win in the competition of modern scientific and technological progress and social change is that China's traditional culture is bound and imprisoned by its backward and conservative side.

China people who first invented the compass and formed navigation technology far ahead of the world on this basis did not appear in the pioneer list of modern geographical discovery in the world. China was able to build ships more than 60 meters long in the Tang Dynasty, while Zheng He's huge fleet in the Ming Dynasty included more than 40 to 60 large treasure ships 100 meters long, the largest of which was 150 meters long, and the whole fleet carried more than 27,000 soldiers and other personnel. However, when Columbus discovered the new continent half a century after Zheng He's voyage to the West, the voyage fleet was only 88 people, and they were divided into three small boats about 19 meters long.

With China's powerful navigation technology, he failed to participate in the feat of developing the New World, not only because of his wrong geographical concept, but also because of many conservative concepts in China's traditional culture, such as narrow local concept (almost no one would want to leave his hometown in order to develop the New World, only paying attention to "promoting China's national prestige" and "taking care of the four categories" and ignoring economic interests (Zheng He's navigation was terminated due to serious economic losses, and the Portuguese tower Gamas was full of hope half a century later).

It is a historical irony that China people who first invented gunpowder and used gunpowder weapons were defeated by western "foreign guns and foreign guns". It is also a typical example of China's traditional cultural conservative concept constraining the technological revolution. China not only used gunpowder and gunpowder weapons in the military as early as the Song Dynasty, but also had ample opportunities to reintroduce and use gunpowder technology after it was introduced to the West and evolved into modern gun technology. For example, in the Ming Dynasty, China began to import some European firearms, including French machine guns and Dutch-made "Red Gun".

Tang Ruowang, a German missionary, and ferdinand verbiest, a Belgian missionary, also designed and presided over the manufacture of western-style artillery, ammunition and mines for the China government in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties. In the hundreds of years after the mid-Ming Dynasty, European merchant ships often went in and out of China waters, so it was not very difficult for China to introduce and use western advanced weapons. At that time, what hindered China's military scientific and technological revolution was still the conservative concept of "the sky remains the same and the road remains the same" in China's traditional culture, which maintained the "ancestral system", opposed changes, called itself "China's great power", and despised foreign culture.

Because the core of China's traditional culture is the unity of man and nature, ethics, natural science, technical science and production science, which are closely related to the national economy and people's livelihood, are all put in a secondary position, while the new idea of changing the existing order is regarded as a scourge and strictly guarded. Therefore, ancient China, which was the first in the world to invent and widely use paper and printing, and made comprehensive progress in education and culture by using these means of text communication, basically only produced a large number of people who only wanted fame. Corrupt Confucian scholars don't care about the fate of the country and the nation, and don't care about natural science, which leads to the extensive penetration of Confucian ethics into the hinterland, but they have not made due achievements in spreading science and technology and advanced ideas.

However, although it is difficult for China's traditional culture to spontaneously produce modern science and technology, it can still cause China's scientific and technological revolution and ideological revolution by absorbing foreign advanced cultural science. However, this process was realized only after China experienced fierce cultural and social conflicts and paid the price of greatly delayed time.

When the modern scientific and technological revolution inevitably affects China, we find that the fruitful scientific and technological revolution can only happen after the extensive and profound ideological and cultural revolution. The real rise of China's modern scientific and technological revolution and the vigorous development of China's modern national industry are based on the achievements of the ideological and cultural revolution from the Reform Movement of 1898 to the abolition of the imperial examination.

History tells us that only by fully absorbing foreign science, technology and other advanced ideas, holding high the banner of science and democracy, and thoroughly criticizing hierarchical ethics, rejecting old pedantic ideas, ignorant ideas against change, arrogance, blind exclusion and contempt for science. Can modern science and technology really begin to replace outdated and outdated traditional science and technology in all fields of society?