There's a certain aspect of Western culture that encourages and obsesses over the seeking of novelty, which still persists to this day as the US continues to spend far more money on basic research, even though applied research would have served its industries more. I don't find this same urge in Eastern cultures, and it's possible it has to do with significant differences in the foundational structure of these societies, where Eastern societies just didn't have a class comparable to the European entrepreneur.
By which I mean, China obviously did have merchants; and it did have bankers. But if you look at their maturity vis-a-vis Europe's during the 16th and 17th centuries, they strike you as being rather rudimentary. Commercial banking, financial instruments, and capital markets were much better developed in the West than they were in China, and that's still the case today. Yet private entrepreneurs were critical to the success of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain - it was they who provided the impetus for inventors seeking upward mobility and who laid the foundations for such inventions via the patents system.
During the same period in China, the educated class competed to become imperial bureaucrats, poets, and artists; and invention was never given much encouragement except when the state found a particular need. Indeed, this still seems to be the case today as China continues to sponsor very targeted research serving strategic needs, rather than invest in an entrepreneurial sense. To this end, while the down side of excessive financialization is becoming obvious, I wonder if China might have too little financialization for the engine of innovation.