I feel that the premise of the question is flawed. The Chinese did have a flourishing printing and book culture from the Tang dynasty onward. Movable type was invented in China during the Song dynasty by Bi Sheng (c. 990-1051). The Song invention of movable type did not create China's printing culture—woodblock printing was already widely in use—but it certainly was a product of it. Movable type did not inspire a "printing revolution" because a printing culture had already been established.

Movable type printing did have a significant impact on China, even if it did not completely replace woodblock printing. Commercial publishers in later imperial China increasingly made use of the unique advantages of movable type printing. By the 15th century, publishers were casting copper-tin metal types throughout southern China. They experimented with lead type and transitioned to wooden type beginning in the 16th century.¹ Wooden type would remain the most popular, and there are at least a hundred surviving books from the Ming period that were produced with wooden type. The technology also spread from China through East and Inner Asia. Movable type printing was adopted by the Koreans, Tibetans, Tanguts, and Uyghurs. Woodblock printing was not supplanted by movable type, but in the Chinese publishing industry, woodblock and movable type printing served different purposes. Movable type printing was more popular than woodblock printing when the number of prints needed were small or the text required frequent updating, such as the genealogies of the Qing dynasty.

There is an argument that the large number of characters in written Chinese prevented movable type from replacing woodblock printing. A partial solution for this problem was devised when a system of 214 radicals for Chinese characters was created. However, there were more important factors that contributed to the advantages of woodblock printing. Woodblock printing allowed for more flexibility in design, production, and investment. It offered more mobility and required less skilled labor or capital. Yet as I mentioned before, in some circumstances movable type printing was still more economical than woodblock printing.

A second claim is that the German printing press was faster than printing techniques (woodblock or movable type) in East Asia. Gutenberg's press does have some advantages over its Asian counterparts. But whether it made European printing better than Chinese printing is debatable. Kai-wing Chow writes, "before the nineteenth century, the speed advantages enjoyed by the printing press were offset somewhat by the relative higher cost of European paper and the various religious and political constraints."

Chow, Kai-wing. Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin, and Joseph Needham. Science and Civilization in China: Paper and Printing Volume 5, Part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

EDIT: Some clarifications.

¹ Type manufactured from wood had previously been tried in Bi Sheng's time, but it did not become technically feasible until three centuries later. The Nong Shu, published in 1313, is the first book to provide a detailed description of the production and use of wooden type.

This problem is mentioned briefly in Kenneth Pomeranz's 2001 book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

Pomeranz notes that while China and Korea possessed the technology creating and using printing presses with movable type (made of wood, metal, or even ceramics), it remained rather uncommon. Instead, by the early Ming Dynasty (1300s) China had an active printing industry in many of the larger cities like Beijing, Jinling, and Hangzhou. However, most works were printed on carved woodblock prints, rather than metal moveable type. This seems to have been a mix of cultural and economic factors. In China, relative to Europe, skilled labor to carve the woodblocks were relatively cheaper, while the metal for type was more expensive, and the larger number of unique characters (more than 5000!) needed even for relatively short works meant that the economics of using metal movable type was highly unfavorable except for very long works like encyclopedias or very high print volumes, like certain government documents.

However, the very large number of surviving indigenous printed books from the Ming and Qing periods suggests that the rarity of European-style metal movable type did not inhibit the production of books. In fact, by the the late Ming period, urban literacy rates were high enough that publishers were putting out specific poetry volumes written BY women FOR women. Relatively wealthy women, of course, who else would have the time to learn to read and write?