Why should this be? This fact certainly puzzled the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, who once wrote:
Although Chinese civilization has hitherto been deficient in science, it never contained anything hostile to science, and therefore the spread of scientific knowledge encounters no such obstacles as the Church put in its way in Europe. (as quoted by Rodney Stark, in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, p. 16).
Moreover, if we survey Chinese intellectual history, we would find a number of figures, like the philosophers Confucius (551-479 BC) and Dai Zhen (1724-1777 AD), who believed, as historian Herrlee G. Creel points out, that one should seek knowledge through "experience and observation" (Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Mao Tse-Tung, p. 230), which would seem reflective of a scientific attitude.
Nonetheless, the Chinese did not develop science in a modern sense. The reason for this is that, despite evidence of quasi-scientific thinking among some Chinese philosophers, the worldviews of most Chinese, whether peasants or intellectuals, did not provide a theoretical basis for science. As Stark points out, "the common people of China...worshipped an elaborate array of gods, each of small scope and rather lacking in character" (p. 16). For their part, most Chinese intellectuals embraced either philosophical Daoism (which is to be distinguished from Daoism as a religion) or Neo-Confucianism. In philosophical Daoism, the focus was on the Dao ("the Way"). The Dao was "the totality of all things, equivalent to what some Western philosophers have called 'the absolute'" (Creel, pp. 101-102). Somewhat similarly, Neo-Confucianism emphasized the concept of li--that is, the principles that give material objects their form, and which "are all really part of the one great li, the Supreme Ultimate, which [the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi] sometimes [equated] with the [Dao]" (Creel, p. 207). In short, for Chinese intellectuals, whether Daoist or Neo-Confucian, "the supernatural [was] conceived of as an essence or principle governing life...that is impersonal, remote, and definitely not a being" (Stark, p. 16). The problem is "just as small gods do not create a universe, neither do impersonal essences or principles--indeed, they don't seem able to do anything" (Stark, p. 16).
In other words, the Chinese lacked the Christian belief in an all-powerful, personal Creator. As the famous historian of science Joseph Needham put it, the failure of the Chinese to develop science was because "the conception of a divine celestial lawgiver imposing ordinances on non-human Nature never developed" (as quoted by Stark, p. 17). For the Chinese, "it was not that there was no order in Nature...but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational, personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed aforetime" (Needham, as quoted by Stark, p. 17). That is to say, for the Chinese, there was no divine Lawgiver who established the laws that governed nature, laws that human beings could discover through scientific inquiry.
In short, if Bertrand Russell had had a better understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of modern science, he would not have been puzzled by the failure of the Chinese to develop science. The fact is that, despite some opposition by the institutional Church to certain scientists, like Galileo, Christianity as a system of belief actually nurtured the development of science. Unfortunately, although Christianity had had a presence in China as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), it never came to exert much influence on the thinking of the Chinese people throughout the period of imperial rule. Thus, it should not be surprising that modern science did not develop in pre-modern China and that the Chinese did not become acquainted with science in the modern sense until the coming of Catholic Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century.
Image of Dai Zhen from eip.utm.edu