SteelBird
Colonel
When the world questions China's quantum satellite invention, someone post this in his comment. I have never seen such an article and here you go:
Why was China erased from Western memory
The remarkable history of Chinese invention - Why was China erased from Western memory?
Introduction
Joseph Needham was an English medical doctor and biologist, teaching in England in the 1930s. By an accident of fate he acquired some Chinese students, and was intrigued to hear their claims of so many medical and scientific discoveries having originated in China, rather than in the West.
Needham became fully fluent in Chinese, and eventually moved to China in 1942 to investigate these claims and to research the entire history of Chinese invention. That work led to an astonishing voyage of historical discovery.
Needham originally planned to write a book cataloguing Chinese inventions, but his first volume barely scratched the surface of his subject. He slowly gatherred many of his students into this enterprise, and they eventually wrote a collection of 26 books, to catalog the history of Chinese discovery.
Myth and Misrepresentation
It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of things invented by the Chinese many hundreds of years, and often several millennia, before they appeared in the West.
All the myths about China and the Chinese being good at 'memorising and passing exams', but being unable to think independently or to be imaginative and creative, are just that - myths. Those stories were never true, not then and not now.
This isn't a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks, but encompasses the entire range of human knowledge from endocrinoloy to mathematics, from agriculture to astronomy.
How could such facts have been hidden from the entire Western world for so long? And why were they withheld? Needham made his discoveries in the 1940s, but our Western education has never made reference to them, never acknowledged them.
We Westerners were taught that virtually all inventions and discoveries arose in Europe but, thanks to Joseph Needham, we have clear documentation proving they existed in China often 1,000 or more years before the Europeans copied them.
In all of the above, Needham has published not only old Chinese texts, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these items, from texts that can be accurately dated. These are not wild claims or suppositions; the evidence is both conclusive and striking, and is there for anyone to examine.
Where has the world been, for so many years? How could all of this have remained hidden? How - and Why - did the West so thoroughly erase China from the world's current historical memory?
China's Former World Position
Eurocentric historians have distorted and ignored China's dominant role in the world economy until about 1800. There exists an enormous amount of empirical data proving China's economic and technological superiority over Western civilization for the better part of several millennia.
Given that China was the world's supreme technological power up to about 1800, it is especially important to emphasize that this is what made the West's emergence possible. It was only by borrowing, copying, and assimilating Chinese innovations and China's much more advanced technology that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.
Until then, China was the leading trading nation, with long distance trade reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Even as late as the early 19th century China's merchants employed 130,000 private transport ships, several times that of Britain, and China had held this pre-eminent position for millennia.
China's innovations in the production of paper, book printing, firearms and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational system.
Moreover, banking, a stable paper money economy, excellent manufacturing and high agricultural yields resulted in China 's per capita income surpassing that of Great Britain until the late 1700s.
