Why is the western world more developed than China, when China is much older than the western world?

Answer 1

Economy tends to drive development; those countries with better economies will have developed faster.

Answer 2

One of the reasons why China has not developed has been the Chinese themselves. Simply blaming the 'Western Powers' for the 'slowdown', is simply putting the blame on the 'outside' forces rather than those of the 'inside'. The Chinese people have been, and still are good at doing this. They chose to ignore much learning from the West, instead focusing their education on The Four Books of Confucianism.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty warlords were rampant throughout most of the countryside. A Civil War raged from 1927-1949, and the occupation of much territory by the Japanese (NOT a Western Power), then Mao Zedong and the Communist Party's 'Great Leap Forward', followed by a disastrous 'Cultural Revolution' did MORE to slow China's development than any 'outside' forces from European Imperialists. It's this very act of blaming someone else, rather than examining themselves, that has retarded China's development.

Answer 3

Both East and West are equally old. The West got a little ahead in the 19th century with a few technological advances. The USA, Britain, Japan and the French used their advantage to force unfair trade agreements onto the Chinese. Britain even fought the 'opium war' with China to force China to stop its war on drugs and allow the import of opium!

But now China has caught up and will soon be the main world power, like it always used to be. USA watch out! Very soon the main power in the world will be a dictatorship, not a democracy. We should fight for human rights in China now, or human rights and employment conditions in our own countries will suffer.

Answer 4

If I could vote, I would have to say "J.S." has the answer. But Hong Kong and Shanghai are ahead of western cities, and the rest of China is not far behind. I've been living in a small small city for a couple years now, and the growth that I've seen is mind boggling. I don't now how its possible. Look out rest of the world.

Answer 5

There can be no right answer, but you have to take into some factors. In the last 100 years china has not had the freedom as the west, the west has improsed trade bans on china, they have been under forgien rule, drug wars, japanese wars etc. Now the USA on the other hand has free trade, has now had to rebuild its self due to past wars, (in fact wars have been good for the USA ecomoncy specilly WWII, it was only this week that the UK paided off the last of its WWII loan to the USA) now if the world banned USA goods which way would the USA turn. But now with free trade or nearly free trade china is is getting bigger and bigger. The USA dollar has fallen by some 5% in the last year compaired to the yuan this year.

Answer 6

China closed themselves off to the rest of the world for a long time and stayed with a more traditional way of life rather than move forward with technological progress.

Answer 7

You should go to Shanghai and Hong-Kong and youl'll see that these cities are more developped than most of the western capitals. They have nothing to envy to the western world at least economicaly and technologicaly speaking.

Answer 8

because the western countries robbed all chinese goods and gold in the 1800s early 1900s to build their countries, that the reason

Answer 9

China 's ecomony is booming in an exponential rate so therefore, it is faster.

Answer 10

developed? my opinion is that china is a very nice place to live and raise a family. bigger is not always better, and more technology is not always better..........but that is just my opinion.