Sure, it’s not only Europe that used a alphabetic writing system; wouldn’t have been purely determined by the writing system. Someone was going to be first, though. But I think that anyone using a logographic system with a huge number of logograms faced a substantial barrier with moveable type—they either had to recreate their system of writing or come up with a different system of inexpensive dissemination of information. East Asia had that barrier in front of it.