A commenter on a post where this was posted earlier pointed out that Diderot and other enlightenment thinkers admired Qing China's civil service, and that these thinkers (being part of a "radical" rather than mostly angloamerican "liberal" intellectual tradition), would influence Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engels.

I'm pretty sure Enlightened Absolutism in the ""enlightened Era'''' is partly based on or hasardly coincident with the idealized ruler in Mohism and Confucianism