Why do modern sailboats use western style instead of Chinese style?

Western sails can be mainly divided into two types: transverse sails and longitudinal sails.

The crosswind navigation ability of the wide and low sail of a galleon, which is divided into many pieces up and down, is poor, but the sail before the wind ability is slightly better than the longitudinal sail (the height is limited). The simple explanation is that you expect to go against the wind with the cross sail, and the Z-shaped progress is basically standing still. In order to overcome this problem, all sail battleships with transverse sails have longitudinal sail systems (that is, jibs between masts). In fact, the Western Sail Battleship is a mixture of both transverse sails and longitudinal sails, and there are additional wing sails (low-speed sails that open left and right on the transverse sails to increase the windward area, which can be understood as the ball sails of modern sailboats).

Chinese sailboats can basically be classified into longitudinal sails. The structure is not as complicated as that of a western battleship. In the case of small volume, the performance can be better than that of western sailboats. However, it is difficult to improve the performance after the volume increases. You can see in ancient paintings that some Chinese sailboats also use complex sails, such as adding soft sails to hard sails, but in fact, these complex sails are basically similar to western sailboats (or they may have been learned after communicating with western sailboats).