Market behavior and private pursuit of wealth could only function within limits defined by the political authorities. For this reason the autocatalytic character that European commercial and industrial expansion exhibited between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries never got started in China. Capitalists in China were never free for long to reinvest their profits at will. Anyone who accumulated a fortune attracted official attention.
because most Chinese felt that any unusual accumulation of private wealth from trade or manufacture was profoundly immoral, since it could only arise when an entrepreneur systematically cheated others by buying cheap and selling dear.