Explain the reason favoring shift from …

The reasons favouring shift from hand printing to mechanical printing in China are: 

(i) Textbooks of Civil Service Examination were printed in vast numbers under the sponsorship of the imperial state. From the sixteenth century, the number of examination candidates went up and that increased the volume of print. 

(ii) By the seventeenth century, print was no longer used just by scholar officials. Merchants used print in their everyday life, as they collected trade information. 

(iii) Reading increasingly became a leisure activity. The new readership preferred fictional narratives, poetry, autobiographies, anthologies of literary masterpieces, and romantic plays. 

(iv) Rich women began to read, and many women began publishing their poetry and plays. Wives of scholar-officials published their works and courtesans wrote about their lives. The new reading culture was accompanied by a new technology. Western printing techniques and mechanical presses were imported in China and Shanghai became the new hub of the new print culture.