It makes sense to compare China to Europe instead of single European countries because they can both be considered civilizations. The difference being that China has always been striving for unification (although throughout much of it's history has actually been divided or in civil war if you'd call it that). Had Qin Shi Huang not imposed cultural and economical uniformity perhaps China would be more like Europe today?
My argument was mostly against popular literature presenting this world view where China just stumbled a little bit and where the rise of the west was almost accidental. I see this all over in "insight porn" type literature. This article sort of started out like that but my knee jerk reaction was wrong.
The concepts of both Europe and China are pretty problematic.
The classical Greeks and Romans, for instance, would be utterly flummoxed if you called them Europeans. Their civilization was something much closer to what we might call the Mediterranean world. Even if you asked them about other civilizations they knew about or were competing with, they would have pointed out Persia long before places like Britain, Germany, or non-Mediterranean France, which are the North Atlantic nations that people are really talking about when they discuss the rise of Europe. And even today, the lived experiences of Greeks are much closer to the lived experiences of, say, Turks than they are to the typical Englishman.
And the "cultural and economical uniformity" of China is easily overstated, and developing it was a long process of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and state building. With hindsight its easy to project our current conception of China back several millenia, but we shouldn't mistake convenient teleologies spouted by the Chinese state as descriptive of the ethno-cultural state of people in that expansive geography two millenia ago.
My argument was mostly against popular literature presenting this world view where China just stumbled a little bit and where the rise of the west was almost accidental. I see this all over in "insight porn" type literature. This article sort of started out like that but my knee jerk reaction was wrong.