A note beforehand: my speciality is not on Chinese science/philosophy. If there are any such experts around, I would be much obliged if you would correct me and give a more complete answer. I apologise beforehand for my brevity when it comes to the actual encounters between Jesuits and Chinese astronomers. Only after writing this, did I realise I sort-of only answered part of the question.

How did, say, China react when their scholars heard about the notion? It presumably met with some skepticism, but was it equally charged?

From a western point of view, it may indeed appear obvious that the Copernican system would be met with scepticism from some traditional establishment whose cosmology was deeply entrenched in their overall belief system.

This assumption would, however, be wrong. Western cosmology was in many ways highly focused on theoretical constructs; the Greeks with their perfect geometrical cycles, platonic scales of divine emanation, and countless debates and attempts at constructing the true frame of the heavens to perfect our calculations and ratiocinations. The Copernican revolution, considered from this perspective, was both the result of this theoretical inclination - it wasn't brought about by new observations forcing them to abandon the old system, though this is often how people think about it, but it was a mathematical and (theo-)cosmological exercise in establishing a more elegant system of cosmology - and the enemy of it, as it forced everyone to reconsider everything they held dear, as the house of cards came tumbling down from a simple change in astronomy. The western approach was very much a "Theory first, observations later" kind of deal.

The Chinese, on the other hand, couldn't give a shit about theory. Their astronomy was primarily and almost exclusively focused on making accurate observations, without worrying too much about whether or not the observed phenomena were compatible with cosmological beliefs. This is why, throughout the western middle ages, Chinese astronomers were happily chugging along recording sun spots, new stars appearing (supernova's), comets, etc., while in the west we find only very limited observations (if any at all) of these things.

So from this point of view, one can begin to understand why Chinese astronomers would not be very shocked at hearing about heliocentrism - in fact, one would rather expect them to find it a boring and pointless topic of conversation, and after a big yawn they would probably leave the table and go back to their observation points, dutifully tracking the movement of the heavens.

Moreover, the theories Chinese astronomers were acquainted with, meant that heliocentrism wasn't much new under the sun anyway. Consider, for instance, the Hsüan Yeh cosmology which they were discussing already for a thousand years before Copernicus, in which the universe is infinite, its space fully empty, and the sun, moon and stars all float freely in this empty space. Stars are just condensed vapours, which explains why they can appear and disappear at times. There are no 'wheels' or spheres, so heavenly bodies are free to move all over the place.

The Hsüan Yeh school was a well-known theory, which also meshed well with larger Taoist and Buddhist beliefs on the great emptiness, infinite space, plurality of worlds, etc. The notion of the stars and planets not being attached to some rigid mechanism, but rather borne along by eternal winds or their own inclinations, were commonly held beliefs. Consider, for example, this Indian source from the 13th century book Po Ya Chhin, by Tèng Mu:

Heaven and Earth are large, yet in the whole of empty space they are but as a small grain of rice... It is as if the whole of empty space were a tree and heaven and earth were one of its fruits. Empty space is like a kingdom and heaven and earth no more than a single individual person in that kingdom. Upon one tree there are many fruits, and in one kingdom many people. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that besides the heaven and earth which we can see there are no other heavens and no other earths!

So, yeah ... Copernicus was not that shocking for these guys. To quote Joseph Needham:

In a word, the Chinese astronomers were practically free from the cramping orthodoxy of Hellenistic and medieval Europe which supposed that the heavenly bodies were fixed to a series of concentric material spheres with the earth as centre. These spheres were essentially nothing but an unjustified concretisation of spherical geometry, and it is rather paradoxical that the Chinese, whose views are so often accused of being excessively materialistic and concrete, should have remained comparatively free from them. They may have had no deductive geometry, but they had no crystalline spheres either. (Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, volume 3, p. 223)

Now, I am sure you are yearning for me to tell you a story anyway, about how the confrontation with our paragons of modern astronomy went. I have written a bit on that before. In a nutshell, the jesuit missionaries were not such big fans of heliocentrism, and their old-fashioned beliefs, combined with a lot of complications in communicating astronomy across languages and vastly different cosmologies, essentially meant that China's introduction to Western astronomy did not go very smoothly. We did show some cool tricks, such as predicting eclipses, showing them our ideas about cartography, and they sure liked our telescopes and general proficiency at instrument making. But the Jesuits presented them not with heliocentrism, but instead tried to make them believe their geocentric ideas. These are some of the notes from an important missionary of the 17th century, Matteo Ricci:

(1) The earth is flat and square, and that the sky is a round canopy; they did not succeed in conceiving the possibility of the antipodes.

(2) There is only one sky (and not ten skies). It is empty (and not solid). The stars move in the void (instead of being attached to the firmament).

(3) As they do not know what the air is, where we say that there is air (between the spheres) they affirm that there is a void.

(4) By adding metal and wood, and omitting air, they count five elements (instead of four)-metal, wood, fire, water and earth. Still worse, they make out that these elements are engendered the one by the other; and it may be imagined with how little foundation they teach it, but as it is a doctrine handed down from their ancient sages, no one dares to attack it.

(5) For eclipses of the sun, they give a very good reason, namely that the moon, when it is near the sun, diminishes its light.

(6) During the night, the sun hides under a mountain which is situated near the earth.

Western superiority complex in a nutshell!

The irony of the situation, then, in relation to your original question, is that even in China, it was the Westerners who kept being shocked about heliocentrism, while the Chinese would have been very welcoming of the knowledge. As Needham phrases it:

Down to the very end of the mission the Jesuits were the prisoners of their limited motive and the Chinese sought persistently to emphasise the continuity of the new science with the old. For example, in 1710 Jean-Francois Foucquet and others of the Society wished to make use of the new planetary tables of P. de la Hire, but the Father-Visitor would not permit it, for fear of 'giving the impression of a censure on what our predecessors had so much trouble to establish, and occasioning new accusations against our religion'. Any acceptance of Copernicanism would equally have raised doubts about all Ricci's teachings. In fact the penalty of enlisting live science in the service of fixed doctrine was to inhibit its development - Urania's feet were bound. Only in certain cases could the Jesuits move forward; for instance, the armillary sphere of 1744 was a Chinese (and therefore 'modern') equatorial, not a Greek ecliptic, instrument; the old European coordinates were quietly given up. Meanwhile the Chinese were much concerned to show that the study of Nature had a continuous history.

Over time, the Chinese did come to know heliocentric theories of cosmology; both by developing their own ideas, and by a slow but steady introduction to the cutting-edge astronomy of the West.

Sources consulted:

• Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, volume 3.

• Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution - A historiographical Inquiry, especially chapter 6.

There was skepticism of heliocentrism in 18th century China, but unlike in West, this was not because of philosophical or religious barriers preventing the acceptance of heliocentric ideas. Chinese objections to heliocentrism were largely the result of the Jesuits, who initially introduced the Copernican model to China as a geocentric model of the solar system. Unsurprisingly, this inconsistency gave some Chinese intellectuals the impression that Western cosmology was incoherent.

The geocentric Ptolemaic model had little impact on Chinese thought prior to the arrival of the Jesuits. Any Ptolemaic influence was indirect. During the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty, the Muslim astronomers working in the Huihui Sitian jian (Muslim Bureau for the Administration of the Heavens) would have presumably been familiar with Ptolemaic ideas. However, the Muslim Bureau was smaller and operated separately from the older Chinese Bureau of Astronomy, and despite speculations there is no concrete evidence that the Muslim Bureau ever housed Ptolemy’s Almagest. In any case, Chinese astronomers computed the motion of celestial bodies algebraically, so the differences between a geocentric or heliocentric view mattered very little when it came down to the actual calculations. As Nathan Sivin in "Copernicus in China" explains:

This they would have found much easier than the great majority of their European contemporaries, whose commitments to Aristotelian and Christian assumptions they did not share. Discoveries that Galileo announced triumphantly could hardly have come as a shock to the Chinese, who did not know the ramifications of the philosophy behind Ptolemy and had never felt its authority.

Furthermore, even if the Chinese were aware of the philosophical implications of the Ptolemaic model, Chinese astronomy and philosophy had been divorced long before the Ming dynasty and the Jesuit missions. The cosmological claims made by Zhu Xi, one of the most significant philosophers of China and a leading figure of Neo-Confucian thought, was entirely ignored by Chinese astronomers on the grounds that it contradicted astronomical calculations. This division between Chinese astronomy and philosophy is apparent in this passage written by astronomer Wang Xichan (1628-1682):

When it came to the Sung period, astronomy bifurcated; there was one astronomy for scholars and another for astronomers. The scholars did not know astronomical mathematics, and so they depended upon empty principles in establishing their theories. The technicians did not apprehend the principles of astronomy, but merely settled upon techniques that managed to predict the phenomena.

The Copernican heliocentric model was first introduced to China by the Jesuits, but their descriptions of Copernican ideas were intentionally misleading. On one hand, many Jesuit writers did wish to give credit where credit is due and properly attribute (non-heliocentric) Copernican ideas to Copernicus. However, Jesuit missionaries adhered to the position of the Catholic Church, which had condemned heliocentrism in 1616 with the Decree of the Congregation of the Index. Even without the 1616 injunction, there is little evidence that Jesuit missionaries working in China were in favor of promoting heliocentric ideas, despite speculations that some individuals within the Jesuit order were "closet" or "putative" Copernicans.

As a consequence, Jesuit missionaries portrayed Copernicus as a proponent of Ptolemaic geocentrism. This can be seen in Adam Schall von Bell's description of Copernican ideas in his Lifa xichuan (On the Transmission of Astronomy in the West) written around 1640:

And then, four hundred years later, there was Copernicus, who determined empirically that although Ptolemy’s methods were quite exhaustive, there was a slight lack of clarity; so he created a new figure and wrote a book in six chapters... Copernicus’ work, as above, has been transmitted as authoritative by most of those who came after him. There was one Simon Stevin, who proved that the methods of Ptolemy and Copernicus are identical. Giovanni Antonio Magini adopted Copernicus’ observational methods and revised Ptolemy’s figure. We see even more clearly that they do not differ in principle.

Copernicus was also presented as a precursor or adherent of Tycho Brahe's geoheliocentrism, rather than as a competing cosmological model. The Tychonic geoheliocentric model sought to find a compromise between Ptolemaic geocentrism and Copernican heliocentrism by positing that the other planets orbited around the Sun while the Sun orbited around the Earth. This interpretation, popularized by the Jesuits, is evident in a passage of the Lixue yiwen (Queries on Mathematical Astronomy) written by Mei Wending (1633–1721) in 1693:

With the coming of Copernicus, there were some revisions to Ptolemy’s methods. With the coming of Tycho there was a great transformation of Copernicus’ methods. The methods were now on the whole complete, but the making of the telescope happened still later, and led through the accumulation of observations to enhanced precision.

A heliocentric presentation of the Copernican model would not emerge in China until the mid-18th century. In 1757, the Catholic Church lifted the ban on works that contradicted geocentrism. The Jesuits were finally allowed to freely expound heliocentric concepts. A significant figure among those who did was Michel Benoist (1715–1774), who accurately described the Copernican system as a heliocentric one. A summary of Copernican ideas is given in an essay by Benoist published circa 1802 or 1803:

Copernicus put the sun at the center of the universe. Closest to it is the planet Mercury, then the planet Venus, then the earth, then the planet Mars, then the planet Jupiter, and then the planet Saturn. The deferent of the moon circles the earth. Alongside the planet Saturn are five small stars that circle it. Alongside the planet Jupiter are four small stars that circle it. Each has its own deferent that moves about its planet. Furthest from all these circles is the heaven of the fixed stars, eternally immobile.

The conflicting accounts of the Copernican model given by different Jesuit writers resulted in some skepticism towards not just Copernican heliocentrism, but Western cosmology as a whole. This attitude is apparent in the writings of Ruan Yuan (1764–1849):

Michel Benoist says that Copernicus, in his discussion of the heavenly bodies, stated that the sun is static, that the earth moves, and that the sphere of the fixed stars is forever immobile. [Benoist goes on to say that] the finest students of astronomy among Western scholars support his theory. This differs considerably from what Schall says in On the Transmission of Astronomy in the West. According to Schall, Copernicus had an explanation of the celestial motions in terms of circles, and sought to determine the sun’s apogee and its angular motions. Now if the orbs move in circles, and if the sun’s distance varies and it has an angular motion, then the firmament and the sun must be moving, not static. How can the theories of one and the same Westerner be so self-contradictory?

While not entirely dismissive of Copernican ideas, Chinese intellectuals like Ruan Yuan were troubled by the seemingly contradictory descriptions of the Copernican model by the Jesuits. Benoist correctly identified the Copernican heliocentric model as a competitor to the Tychonic geoheliocentrism, whereas earlier writers such as Schall and Giacomo Rho claimed that Tycho's work was in agreement with Copernicus. Unaware of the centuries of religious controversy that had led to this confusion, their conclusion was that the Copernican system was itself inconsistent.

For further reading, see:

Elman, Benjamin. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Sivin, Nathan. "Copernicus in China" from Science in Ancient China. Researches and Reflections. Aldershot: Variorum (1995)