Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty - a comparison

This is adopted from Cambridge Illustrated History: China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey

The Han dynasty was contemporaneous with the Roman Empire and has often been compared to it.  Han and Rome both had strong governments that expanded geographically, promoted assimilation, and brought centuries of stability to the central regions.  Both managed to deal with enormous problems of scale, ruling roughly similar numbers of people over roughly similar expanses of land.  Both developed bureaucratic institutions, staffing them with educated landowners.  Both invested in the construction of roads, defensive walls, and waterworks.  Both were threatened by barbarians at their frontiers and often used barbarian tribal units as military auxiliaries.  

The contrasts between the Han and Roman empires are equally instructive.  China was a civilization based much more profoundly on crop agriculture.  Not only did animal husbandry play less of a role in agriculture, but cities and commerce played a lesser role in the overall economy.  Cultural cohesion was also of a different order in Han China than in Rome.  Perhaps because of the Chinese script, it is much easier to talk about a common culture among the elite in Han China than in the Roman Empire.  As the influence of Chinese culture increased in frontier areas with the presence of Chinese garrisons and magistrates, members of the local population learned to read Chinese in a logo graphic script that fostered the basic Chinese premises and hindered articulation of distinctly local values.  Even if Latin became a lingua franca in the Roman Empire, other written languages continued to be used, including Greek, Hebrew, and Demotic Egyptian, which facilitated the survival of non-Roman ideas in a way unknown in China.  What we know of the values of the Dian, Yue, and Xiongnu come almost entirely from texts written in Chinese.