I find this fascinating. The fact that the Chinese writing system isn‘t universal likely prevented the take-off of the printing press in the eleventh century.

"Even so, movable type did not make much difference when it was invented in China in the eleventh century, perhaps because of the usual lack of interest in universality, or perhaps because the Chinese writing system used thousands of pictograms, which diminished the immediate advantages of a universal printing system. But when it was reinvented by the printer Johannes Gutenberg in Europe in the fifteenth century, using alphabetic type, it initiated an avalanche of further progress." - David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity