RousseauX
Donor
most pre-modern governments defaults to Laissez-Faire by default though: because governments are very weak and are incapable of enforcing the sort of regulations one associate with modern states even if they wanted toFrom an economic side, there were plenty of opportunities for China to embrace much more classical liberal policies throughout many of its dynasties. A cursory reading of the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties will show that the idea of centralized control over the economy that those dynasties so often implemented was often debated, and there were many Confucian scholars in good standing that proposed ideas such as eliminating the government monopolies and even, at one point, licensing all the counterfeiters across the empire as private mints (!). If you ascribe to the idea (as I do) that economic liberty is necessary for political liberty, then here's a good starting point.
On the political side, you can make a solid argument that the Mandate of Heaven is, in many ways, a counterpart to the idea of the social contract, with many parallels. From that perspective, you could get something along the lines of Constitutional Monarchy in China, without toppling the Imperial system.
The closest you got Adam Smth's nightwatchman's state was Qing China, which had 1 government Mandarin for every 100,000 people or so. If you include government employees in general it governed a country of 400 million with around 25,000 civil servants of some sort.