One of the intriguing issues of Joseph Needham's Civilization in China is why the scientific revolution and the Industrial Revolution did not originate in China. In fact, before the 15th century, China was ahead of the Western nations, both in science and in technology. However, China suffered a disastrous decline in the subsequent era while its Western counter parts became the great powers of the world. Four possible explanations of the Needham Puzzle are discussed widely. These include the imperial examination system hypothesis, the high-level equilibrium hypothesis, the geographical endowment hypothesis, and the property rights hypothesis. Though each of these hypotheses may, more or less, provide a plausible explanation, none of them can be proved by available evidences. Our paper provides an alternative explanation and applies an empirical approach and data to support our theoretical hypothesis. To help solve the Needham Puzzle, we term the institutional change hypothesis. Our hypothesis incorporates North's institutional change theory, as well as the leading factor of China's institutional structure. Economic theory holds that motive and constraint are the two essential factors which influence behaviors. Any motive for scientific inquiries, whether from practicality utility or simply curiosity, is the same for everyone. As a result, the logical explanation for the Needham Puzzle should focus on the constraint. The leading factor of China's historical institution is its single-authority structure. Political operations in ancient China were under the premise of maintaining and strengthening the authoritarian. There have been four important ideologies in China: Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, and Legalism. Confucianism has comparative advantages in both political and policy implementation. Confucianism helped incumbent rulers build a strong bureaucratic system and a familial patriarchal system to strengthen the authoritarian. Confucianism gradually became the mainstream thought of Chinese culture as a result of enforcing single-authority. This unique institutional structure also suppressed innovation while initiating many unique political and social phenomena. All these phenomena are incentive compatibles, in other words, they are the different results evoked by the same motivation. In addition, empirically, we count and check the knowledge stock structure of different historical periods by various official bibliographies and bibliographies in historical records. We use historical literature related to science and technology as a proxy to represent the scientific and technological level, and literature related to Confucianism as a proxy for the level of the policy intensity of the Confucian domination. That allows us to capture the dynamic trend in the development of science and technology knowledge. Our analysis shows that the volumes of Confucianism-related literature are negatively associated with the volumes of scientific and technological literature. It also indicates that technological innovation was gradually ignored by the Chinese ruling class in maintaining its authority. All these evidences verify our theoretical hypothesis.