The great contribution of China to politics was the development of a bureaucratic, meritocratic civil service, based on mastery of a well-defined canon of scholarship. Civil servants were scholars. Already under the Han dynasty, Confucianism (the Rújiā or school of the scholars) was made the official ideology of the State and the basis of the competitive examination system. Europe was less advanced in political organization than China. Rulers and their courts relied on family ties and brute force. The only working bureaucracy belonged to the Catholic Church. This paper follows the parallel development of both the Western and the Chinese traditions and emphasizes their points of intersection, such as the Jesuit missions to China in the 16th and 17th centuries and the visits of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey around 1920.