(Silk can be added to the the list, after all it was called the 'Silk Road' for good reason. The Four Great Inventions were helpful for the development of European states and the bureaucracy required.)
Well, my grandgrandfather always told that those were worst Chinese inventions:
With gunpowder, came standing armies made of conscripts.
With paper, came institutionalized bureaucracy.
With money, came central banks effectively taxing every user of paper currency by printing more of it.
A modern state was made by them: conscript armies, professional bureaucrats, and central bankers
It were firearms that made "a lot of farmers with guns" a more effective fighting force than an army of professionals trained from childhood.
The "manufacturing rate" of professional bureaucracy was greatly limited by amount of gifted and trusted cadres, it was much of a matter of talent, and personality. The power of state greatly increased by eliminating the "broken phone" factor with written edicts, and allowing to hire and train less select people for bureaucratic work.
And for money, metal coin money was quite expensive to made, and it could've been smelted to make real goods - a thing of value, unlike fiat currency
A cute story, except that it's not historically accurate; conscript armies are extremely old, bureaucracy can be dated to the clay tablet era, early Chinese money was made of metal ("knife money" etc) and the history of inflationary paper disasters is usually traced to the assignats of France.
Yes, want I wanted to state that it was paper that dramatically increased scale and efficiency of bureaucratic systems, allowing it to keep taps on incomparably larger number of things. It it possible for transition from hereditary class-ecclesiastic administration to professional bureaucracy.
No longer ruling the country was about a king or a man just one handshake away him touring the country and issuing edicts every few months.
historians also sort of seem to agree that the need for a bureacracy started to exist after the argicultural revolution, which resulted in humans setteling on permanent patches of land.
Maybe you took my mention of the word 'bureaucracy' without reading the implied sarcasm, my point still stands though, the Chinese were the first to have their IP stolen. Although I am sure that, as of now, there is a little bit of give and take, not that I am proficient enough in vue.js to really know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Inventions
(Silk can be added to the the list, after all it was called the 'Silk Road' for good reason. The Four Great Inventions were helpful for the development of European states and the bureaucracy required.)