In the European and Middle Eastern cultures, the idea of a "vital spark" that makes the difference between a living and a dead thing is ubiquitous, stretching from the ancient Greek "pneuma" to Judaic "ruach" to relatively recent vitalistic speculations.
This "vital spark" is often equated by esotericists (and historians of religion and philosophy with a syncretistic bent) to the Chinese "Qi", but, to me, the two are hardly alike - I believe that in Chinese religion and philosophy, Qi was always posited to be inherent not only in living beings, but also in inanimate objects and even terrain features. So, unlike a "vital force", the Qi does not appear to constitute the alive-ness of living beings. How else did the Chinese attempt to explain the difference between living and dead things? Did they attempt it at all? Did they even see a qualitative difference between the animate and the inanimate, or were all things considered "alive" in their own fashion, with some of the alive things able to do what, to the "Western" philosophers signified life, such as moving, breathing, eating, etc, and others unable to, but no less "alive" for the lack of it?
Hiya, can you please specify an era you're interested in? This is AskHistorians; we discuss specific historical contexts here. :)
I have done research into Taoist and Chinese Wuism so I can give you a little background.
Yes, qi is not limited to living things but there's a bit of a difference here - the Chinese Wuism religion in particular believes that everything has a kind of spirit lurking in it - it is essentially a form of animist belief where divinity lurks in everything.
So you see at least in the early Chinese history (Zhou to Han dynasty, whereafter Buddhism really supplanted a lot of Wu's mysticism) the Tao and Wu were both heavily of the belief that spirits lurk in everything and given certain rituals objects could be bewitched into life, so to speak. Also, Taoists believe that when your body runs out of qi, you die. Essentially it's like fuel in your car, it runs out and the engine sputters to a stop.
Examples of this belief include the Taoist belief of Shijie Xian - the lowest form of Taoist immortality. This involves a practicing Taoist faking their death and using a bewitched object in place of their corpse, which essentially fools the heavens and allows them to be immortal. The object becomes the person's corpse, if done correctly and thus fools humans and the divines of Heaven. Another example includes the Jiangshi - a kind of Chinese Zombie that is made from a bewitched corpse, which drains qi from people like a vampire to sustain it's own lifeforce.
The point here is that the ideas of life proposed by the Chinese in the early period especially were very different from the perspectives in Western societies.
Sources