(Not an expert but) Chinese writing is hieroglyphic, wheres 'western writing' is phonetic. Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press, whereas hieroglyphics have thousands of characters (for thousands of concepts) but aren't fundamentally linked to the language like western characters are.
> Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press
This is vastly overstated. This was a widely popularized idea in the west but has largely been debunked by more recent scholarship that is less interested in demonstrating the superiority of the west.
Tom Mullaney at Stanford has a good book on chinese typewriters (this narrative is usually presented against both printing presses and typewriters) and is a good entrance into the intersection of chinese script and technology.
History research is typically published in books rather than papers, so it isn't content I can link to directly.
