• In terms of parallel developments, both Confucianism and Buddhism developed traditions during the early modern period that bore some similarity to the thinking of Martin Luther in Europe in that they promoted a moral or religious individualism that encouraged individuals to seek enlightenment on their own.
• As in Christian Europe, challenges to established orthodoxies emerged as commercial and urban life, as well as political change, fostered new thinking.
• In Chinese elite culture, there emerged a movement known as kaozheng, or "research based on evidence," which bears some comparison to the genuinely scientific approach to knowledge sponsored by Western Europe.
• In terms of differences, despite the similarity of kaozheng to the Western scientific approach, in China it was applied more to the study of the past than to the natural world, as occurred in Western Europe.
• Cultural change in China was less dramatic than in Europe.
• Confucian culture did not spread as widely as Christianity.