I can't answer the second part of your question re: inspiration in other major civilizations, but the short answer to the first part is: No way you've heard of it. Unless you had contact with foreigners who spoke Chinese (VERY unlikely, read about the Macartney Embassy's difficulties finding interpreters--they had to use a 12-yr-old), you weren't going to hear about it. The problem is exacerbated because you were almost certainly illiterate, and capped off with the fact that the elites didn't so much "censor" things about the outside world as assumed no one would care about the barbarians. A letter to the King of England from the Qing Emperor at the time explicitly calls England a remote island of no real significance, "cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea". China was the center, what happened on the fringes didn't matter to "civilized people". Even the literate elites focused more on philosophy as it pertained to running the bureaucracy, rather than current events outside the Middle Kingdom.

In short, unless you found a French priest who followed politics back home despite the multi-month journey, you probably wouldn't have even heard of France.