The Tang and Song Dynasties and Why they did not have an industrial revolution:

When the common person in the United States or Europe discusses the industrial revolution, they are almost unfailingly to the incredible amount of inventions of machines that could do the job of the animals or animal body parts that had previously done the work that occurred first in Britain, then spread to America, France, Germany, and Japan; and to the rest of the world from there. They most likely are not referring to the Tang and Song dynasties of China from 618-1238 (the two dynasties combined). This is with good reason, for in no way does this time period even partially resemble the remarkable change that occurred in the West some 600 years later.
It has been purported by some that the Tang and Song dynasties were in fact part of an industrial revolution. This is based on the somewhat numerous technological advances that were achieved during the two dynasties, such as gunpowder, a thread-spinning machine, and the ability to cure some diseases with vaccinations. This, while technically applying to the meaning of the phrase of "industrial revolution" were the euphemism not a part of common vernacular, indicating a greater meaning than the sum of the meaning of the two words. An industrial revolution must so increase urbanization that it is a watershed moment in civilization, much as the decision to go from hunting to farming is a watershed moment. An industrial revolution is when a society, or at least its upper crust, believes that machines can do a job with more precision, efficiency, accuracy, and reliability than a human can, and therefore it is advisable to use machines instead of humans for such jobs as manufacturing, or for even running the controls of the machines that manufacture items. This was not evident in either Tang or Song dynasty, because of the inherent conservatism and backwards looking idealism that Confucianism engenders. The Chinese did not even weaponize the most obviously powerful substance that they invented, gunpowder, which was used by the Mongols and later the Ottoman Turks in the most inventive ways. This lack of the slightest mechanical understanding of how some of their inventions might be useful cost the Chinese much, and it is the primary reason why the Chinese are only today catching up with the rest of the world in terms of an industrial economy.