In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark says that Imperial China actually had an industrial revolution, in the 11th century. They produced 100,000 tons of iron. They were using the iron to improve productivity of other things. And then the imperial court ordered that everything be shut down because the wrong kind of people were getting rich.
Stark has sources for this, which he documents, but I can't cite them because I don't have the book with me at the moment.
But, presuming that Stark's sources are accurate, Imperial China did have an industrial revolution. The powers that be decided that it was causing too much disorder in their society, so they killed it.
So maybe that's a big part of the answer. When it happens, don't kill it with stupid politics.
Some have argued that the reason Europe's industrial revolution took off is that there was no central authority to shut down industrial development and exploration over the whole continent.
> wrong kind of people were getting rich
In Europe, the nobility wasn't powerful enough to shut down the merchants.
By a number of measures China was more advanced than most of the West after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Why the West Rules for Now goes into this in a fair bit of detail. But Europe spiked up again and, once the industrial revolution hit, the growth essentially made everything that went before look like a flatline by comparison.
Or maybe do? Maybe they were right that, from a societal rather than individual point of view, their industrial revolution was a disadvantage, at least at that stage.
I would imagine the motivation would simply be that Chinese aristocracy had zero leniency with the notion of a wealthy, non-aristocratic class. From the perspective of the power structure, I can only imagine that's what 'wrong people' would mean. There was a similar tension in Europe I think.
Worse in China, I think. I'm very much not an expert, but I think that Confucianism called for a more rigidly hierarchical society than Catholicism did. (And maybe for that reason, the Chinese imperial court was very committed to Chinese society rigidly following Confucianism.)
Stark has sources for this, which he documents, but I can't cite them because I don't have the book with me at the moment.
But, presuming that Stark's sources are accurate, Imperial China did have an industrial revolution. The powers that be decided that it was causing too much disorder in their society, so they killed it.
So maybe that's a big part of the answer. When it happens, don't kill it with stupid politics.