History of Chinese Inventions

Some surprising facts here

China as a nation has the longest and by far the most vast record of inventions in the history of the world. It is now reliably estimated that more than 60% of all the knowledge existing in the world today originated in China, a fact swept under the carpet by the West.

An article by Larry Romanoff. Excerpts:

The Chinese invented the decimal number system, decimal fractions, negative numbers, and the zero, so far in the past that the origin is lost in the mists of time. The Chinese tracked sunspots and comets with such detail and accuracy that these ancient records are still used as the basis for their prediction and observation today. The Chinese were drilling for natural gas about 2,500 years ago, wells 4,800 feet deep, with bamboo pipelines to deliver the gas to nearby cities. The Chinese pioneered the mining and use of coal long before it was known in the West. Marco Polo and Arab traders marveled at the “black stone” that the Chinese mined from the ground, that would burn slowly during an entire night.

[…]

The above summary doesn’t even begin to adequately catalog of the extent of Chinese invention, of the sum of China’s discoveries and contributions to the modern world. But unfortunately, much of China’s total sum of knowledge and history of invention is lost to the world forever. A large part of the recorded knowledge of China’s history was destroyed in one of the greatest acts of cultural genocide in the history of the world – the looting and burning of China’s Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, which contained more than ten million of the finest and most valuable historical treasures and scholarly works from 5,000 years of Chinese history. What could not be looted was destroyed, and the entire massive palace burned to the ground. This wanton theft and utter destruction of one of the world’s greatest collections of historical knowledge was engineered by the Rothschilds and Sassoons in retaliation for Chinese resistance to their opium.

[…]

But in terms of the destruction of a literary recording of culture and invention, there was perhaps an even greater crime against the history of Chinese knowledge – the destruction of the library and the Yongle Dadian at the Hanlin Academy.[6] That encyclopedia of 22,000 volumes written by more than 2,000 scholars over many years, contained much of the total of 5,000 years of Chinese knowledge, invention and thought. The British carried all those books outdoors, poured fuel on them, and burnt the entire collection to ashes. Only God knows what was lost in this tragic destruction, ordered by the same drug dealers as punishment for refusing opium, meant to break China’s will by striking at the very heart of the nation’s culture in the wanton destruction of something of such inestimable value as to leave an open wound that would never heal. Only about 150 volumes survived the incineration, 40 those residing today in the US Library of Congress, which has no intention of returning them to China.

[…]

Westerners today justify their unacknowledged appropriation of Chinese knowledge and subsequent claims to ownership on some variant of the proposition that the Chinese invented those things, but never developed or capitalised on them, but the claim is invalid self-serving nonsense since my invention is mine whether or not I choose to develop it. The claim is also untrue.

When the Chinese invented paper and printing, books became widespread throughout China, as with the weaving of cloth and development of textiles. China employed its inventions in unlimited ways for the benefit of Chinese society. What they did not do is file patents, convert everything to privately-owned IP, and transfer their ingenuity from social benefit to private profit. Criticisms of China’s use of its inventions are not so much negating a lack of application but the absence of commercialisation, these Western justifications implying that any nation not immediately striving for profit maximisation of its discoveries is morally negligent, the theft of those discoveries then justified by those who would use them more properly. This is the bank robber taking the high moral ground by claiming he put the money to better use than the bank would have done.

To have foregone private commercialisation was neither a character flaw nor a behavioral fault, but a reflection of the pluralistic and socialistic nature of the Chinese people, the same reason that even today China’s patent and IP laws and regulations are so much less aggressive than those of the US. Put simply, China has never been as capitalistic or as individualistic as the West. It is part of the greatness of the Chinese nation that this immense population engaged in millennia of stunning research, discovery and invention and freely distributed those fruits throughout the nation. This emphasis on the greater good and overall benefit to society rather than individual profit, is fundamental to the natural humanity of the Chinese people, and cannot be permitted to be destroyed by the sociopathic Western model so forcefully promoted today on the basis of a fictitious moral superiority.

Continue reading here.