Leibniz "urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft" (29)
and may have been successful--"over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea the every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams. It might seem surprising that they did so, since nothing resembling that had existed in any previous period in European history. Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China."