The reason that Gutenberg succeeded in beginning a total revolution in society and the Chinese printers did NOT is to be found in the nature of European versus Chinese writing systems. When I was a kid, I had one of these kiddie printing kits. Although I was only a tyke, I quickly discovered that I could print ANYTHING with my little box of rubber type. There were 26*2 + a couple of dozen distinct characters, giving less than a hundred different pieces and less than a thousand pieces of type when multiplicity of character was considered. Compare the less than 100 distinct characters with the more than 15,000 distinct Chinese characters of a MINIMAL Chinese equivalent. The simplicity of European writing systems was far simpler and more practical than the unwieldy Chinese system. The complex nature of Chinese typography has held Chinese civilization back for centuries and continues to do so. Chinese culture was a prisoner of the ideographic symbolism of written Chinese vis-à-vis the phonetic based Western symbolism.