I think 科舉 played a role at instilling the tradition of academic excellence among East Asian yeomen. Whereas in the post-Classic West, power is off limit to most commoners.
The West promulgated itself to global dominance because early on the European explorative period leaders such as Henry of Portugal, Cristobal Colombus, Ferdinand Magellan (to name a few) focused on global trade, and this yearning to trade, this mercantilistic spirit in turn drove the advances in cartography, improvement of sailing ships, military gun powder based weapons that would in turn be used to dominate other cultures. This was exacerbated further when the West found the New World (North / Central/ South Americas) and colonized the new frontier.
The experience in subjegating the natives, ergo, the Nahuatl (Aztecs), the Incans, the Caribbean Mesoamericans as wella s the Mesoamericans of the Eastern Seaboard (Lene Lenape, Shawnee, Delaware, etc) would breed new strategies in combating other new civilizations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania etc.
So while the East Asian civilizations of Tokugawa Japan, Qing China, Jeoseon Korea were content with their closed door policy and introspective-focused societies, the West (Britain, Spain, Netherlands, France, Portugal) were busy expanding their empires throughout the known world. Science and new scientific discoveries was merely a product of such unprecedented global control.
A las, until the Great East Asian Societies were forced to open --- at point of gun.
lol
Never again. Yes?
Let me reiterate an important theme that has plaqued East Asia's preponderance --- it is the unnatural obsession to yearn for an ancient era, an ancient glorious period. The Chinese , traditionally, yearned and glorified the Han Dynasty, tho it was over 2000 years ago. The Koreans yearn and glorify the Koguryo Dynasty, the Japanese Glorify the Yamato Period, respectively were also over 2000 years ago.
You see that was the etiology of our fixation for the past, for the study of the classics.
Why even in today's age there are even some of us who still are fixated on some period of the historical past , so much that it blinds many to the potential of the future. An innate East Asian aspect of the psyche, i assume.
