YES, THE CHINESE WERE DIFFERENT

I decided to read Jacques Gernet's one-volume history of China long before Mitten$ started babbling about Anglo-Saxon culture  and I noted below some of the "firsts" the Chinese can claim.

China also differed in its long-standing political culture:

No doubt there existed in the Chinese world independent forms of religious life, military circles with their own traditions, a very active mercantile sector which escaped the hold of the state, but no clergy, no military caste, no merchant class ever succeeded in gaining political power. This is certainly one of the constants and one of the great original aspects of the Chinese world, one that distinguishes it from all others.

We find in China neither that subordination of the human order to the divine order nor that vision of the world as a creation born of ritual and maintained by ritual which are part of the mental universe of India.  (Gernet, p. 28)

To make this a little clearer, there never was anything like the West's "Prince-Bishops" in China.