China was ahead of Europe in terms of technological innovations often more than one thousand years until the 16th century. At that point in time one observes in China a very interesting shift in public focus away from the physical world towards the area of administration and public service. There was no more incentive for creative and intelligent minds to study patterns in astronomy, alchemy with the intensity (and government support) of Kepler and Newton. In those times the best Chinese students would seek a position in the government administration.
From the perspective of complex systems one could argue that the study administration of social systems is by definition self-referential and therefore at a higher level of complexity than natural sciences. On the other hand there seems to have been little incentives for innovations in the administrative system itself. Instead, students were required in great detail to reproduce knowledge that was hundreds or even thousands of years old. In the landscape metaphor one could interpret the Chinese State as a dynamical fixed point that is stable enough to last longer than any other state system in the world.
The stability of a system, however, can be destroyed if the rest of the landscape is continuously evolving. At some critical parameter configuration the system become meta-stable in the sense that finite external perturbations can destabilize the system and induce a transition to a new fixed point or another attractor. In China one can interpret the interactions with European countries and Japan in the 19th and 20th century as such an external perturbation that led to a state transition.