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Chinese people learning modern technology and science must continually refer to the English language for help, and that they do. It can be said that, in China, where English study is readily available, the country advances. Where English language skills are at their lowest, China virtually remains in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Japanese seem to get by pretty well on the technical field using Chinese characters. Japanese medical and engineering (except CS) words are almost exclusively written in Chinese characters (many of which are identical in Chinese). The Japanese are also notorious for low levels of English proficiency. Thus, the problem isn't the script, but the education level. Educated people in China also happen to learn English. This is an obvious case where correlation doesn't equal causation.

Also, Chinese words and Chinese characters are two separate concepts. "Shehui" (society) is one Chinese word consisting of two Chinese characters. There is not a single native Chinese speaker who would read "shehui" as two separate words. Combining morphemes (in the case of Chinese, characters) to make new words is nothing new. German does this for practically all of its modern vocabulary. Is Germany also stuck in the 18th and 19th century?

The Japanese seem to get by pretty well on the technical field using Chinese characters.

The Japanese have more than one writing system commonly in use. They use hiragana characters for syllabification of Japanese words, katakana for syllabification of foreign words, and the Chinese characters (kanji) for representing particular words or phrases of hiragana. This makes the Japanese language very adaptable to new words and new words are commonly added. While those words can't use the kanji characters, they can just be written in hiragana or katakana (if they are loan words). For example, ニュートリノ is neutrino in katakana which is niyu-torino in romanji (though I haven't indicated the emphasis). Occassionally, kanji is updated (the last time I think was after WWII) so words get standardized. For example, antiproton is 反陽子 which breaks down to はんようし in hiragana (since proton was presumably included in the last standardization).

Read a couple articles from Asahi or some other Japanese language news source and you will start to understand how the Japanese language has adapted with its different character sets (in general, kanji are complex, hiragana are soft, and katakana are sharp).