The Permanent Divide in Cognitive Paradigms: Chinese Civilization's Continuous Inferiority to European Civilization from Civilizational Genesis to the Present

In comparative studies of Chinese and Western civilizations, the mainstream view in contemporary Chinese academia adopts a multicultural narrative holding that "Chinese and Western civilizations followed different paths, with neither superior to the other." It attributes China's scientific and technological backwardness in modern times to institutional, environmental and social factors after the medieval period. Meanwhile, Chinese academia generally subscribes to the traditional historiographical perspective that "ancient Chinese civilization maintained a long-standing lead over the West", from which the much-debated "Needham Question" arises. Such arguments are constrained by values of cultural equality, narratives of national self-esteem and public-political discourse, rather than grounded in a purely objective comparison of cognitive paradigms. Setting aside racial superiority theories, national sentiments, ideological considerations and all other external distractions, this paper takes the underlying cognitive structures at the very genesis of civilizations as its sole analytical standpoint. It puts forward a core thesis: from its very origin, Chinese civilization was innately inferior to European civilization rooted in ancient Greek thought in terms of core thinking paradigms and capacity for cognitive iteration. The divergence was not a gap that emerged in later historical stages, but a genetic-level divide at the starting point of civilization. European civilization is rooted in formal logic, axiomatic deduction and the intellectual tradition of pure rational speculation, endowing it with self-correcting potential for boundless cognitive iteration. By contrast, Chinese civilization was locked from its inception into modes of thinking based on sensory experience, analogical association and practical utility, which carry an in-built cognitive ceiling and bottlenecks for technological iteration. The so-called "Needham Question" is a typical pseudo-proposition. Its flawed premise obscures the cognitively hierarchical gap between Chinese and-Western civilizations established from the very beginning. China's comprehensive backwardness in modern times was not accidental stagnation, but an inevitable outcome stemming from the underlying thinking paradigm of its civilization.