The Chinese Miracle and Its Retrogression: Why could China not have pursued her technological ingenuity?

Ancient China achieved a very rapid technological progress and introduced many new techniques and instruments which fundamentally changed the world history. Despite that progress period, the technological pace of China was abruptly halted just after the fall of the Song dynasty. This situation raised the question why China could not pursue its development and become the first industrial nation. Within a comparative perspective which puts the West in the center, that failure was explained by several authors as a result of the unique cultural properties of the Chinese people. However, introduction of diversities of the Chinese culture as the reason of retrogression would not be coherent with the course of history as the Chinese people achieved those technological advancements with the same culture. The paper introduces an historical investigation for the retrogression of China after fourteenth century through employing parallelism between the Chinese technological progress and urbanization at the core of the elucidation