Tocqueville on China

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington D.C. think tank, has a new project on its research agenda: Tocqueville On China, an intellectual experiment that channels the penetrating observations of the French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville in order to elucidate the current state of China’s civil society.

According to the project’s mission statement, this initiative springs from the need to re-invigorate studies of China’s post-Mao civil society: “Today’s China-watchers face no shortage of issues or policy areas to study. Experts look at China’s economy, foreign and defense policies, human rights record, business practices, corruption levels, environmental policies, even demographics. But for all the important work being done on China today, we believe too little attention has been paid to understanding contemporary Chinese civic culture.”

To be sure, this project breaks sharply with the run-of-the mill think tank report. Far from recycling Beltway talking points, this initiative offers up a highly original take on China’s politics and challenges political scientists – including those engaged in policymaking, presumably AEI’s target audience – to rethink how Chinese politics can and should be examined. For this, AEI should be commended.

But while the academic necessity underlying the goals of this project is clear, the utility of a Tocquevillian take on modern China is less than self-evident. Why employ the insights and worldview of a man from a decidedly different set of historical circumstances and intellectual assumptions, a man who had little exposure to and interest in China?

James W. Ceaser, professor of political science at University of Virginia and a contributor to the project, offers up the following justifications in his introductory essay, Why Tocqueville?: “Tocqueville was one of the first thinkers to address two themes that have preoccupied modern thinkers of China: modernization and transition…he treats the themes now central to comparative politics with a freshness that has been lost in the layering of subsequent scholarship, in which certain premises have come to be accepted with hesitation.”

Without identifying these “certain premises,” Ceaser proceeds to explain how Tocqueville’s political inquiries into the political fabric of 19th century France and America provide a helpful launching point for those that seek to better understand Chinese civic society in the 21st century. In the eyes of Professor Ceaser, Tocqueville’s methodology proves particularly helpful in exploring the two foundations of American democracy, those enshrined in his seminal work Democracy in America: the social state and the political regime. In 21st century China, as in 19th century America, these forces shape the course of political history and ineradicably altered individual liberty and the concentration of political power. When, why, and how these forces altered China’s post-Mao civil life is an under-researched field, at least for contemporary political scientists, and thus constitutes the central focus of AEI’s study.

While Tocqueville the man does not fit into the story, his methodology and his intellectual legacy inform the central premise of the project: to identify and characterize the nuances of civil life in China, the untold stories of the average political participant. By shifting Tocqueville’s study to the back alleys of Chinese politics, Ceaser contends, the causality and trajectory of liberal democracy in China can be reconstructed and retold in new, instructive ways. Indeed, it is precisely because of Tocqueville’s love of liberty that his (artificially constructed) take on the authoritarian aspects of China’s political system is worth exploring today.

Other scholars involved in the project, like Princeton’s Perry Link, address specific aspects of Chinese civil life that would potentially be of interest to Tocqueville. In his contribution, Corruption and Indignation, Professor Link explores the various avenues for discerning popular sentiment in Chinese society – namely, blogs, popular novels, and ditties (shunkuoliu). Principally concerned with perceptions of corruption, Professor Link addresses how popular sentiment in China is disseminated and how, in turn, these ideas affect the legitimacy of the central government. In other words, Professor Link, like Tocqueville, puts his ear to ground (or more precisely, his eyes to the computer screen), to better understand how average citizens (and netizens) cope with the negative aspects of political life in present-day China. As Professor Link observes, “In daily life, the Communist Party is like the weather: you deal with it, but you don’t–you can’t–entertain alternatives.”

Carol Lee-Hamrin, research professor at George Mason University, addresses China’s burgeoning Protestant minority in her contribution, China’s Protestants. Interested in both the forces behind China’s growing religious organization and its potential to affect civil life, Professor Lee-Hamrin explores the changing role of the religion in the state – a bread-and-butter topic for Tocqueville, to be sure – in an effort to suss out if and how, in her own words,  “Protestant Christianity will once again play a significant role in the reordering of China’s civic life.”

Perhaps the most interesting contribution of the series, largely because of its simultaneous contributions to China studies and Tocqueville’s intellectual legacy, is Robert Gannett Jr.’s paper, Village-by-Village Democracy in China. As the executive director of the Institute for Community Empowerment, Mr. Gannett brings his extensive knowledge of community organizing to bear in his analysis of local village Chinese government – what he suggests might better be called China’s “seeds of freedom” – and the latent democratizing forces brewing in China’s countless villages. Interested in China’s many and various forms of local village government, Mr. Gannett explores the central government’s dynamic relationship with local political organizations and its tightrope walk between cultivating local control (democracy promotion) and maintaining authority (democracy subversion). Mr. Gannett’s central thesis, one undoubtedly inspired by Tocqueville, is that “village government can plant the seeds of national freedom–but only if its emerging democratic citizens learn to protect themselves from national-level attempts to coerce, co-opt, or compromise their efforts.” Mr. Gannett traces the interwoven legacies of republicanism and village control into the modern day, and in so doing highlights potential sources and forces of democracy promotion in modern China.

While these scholarly contributions are no doubt welcome, their professed grounding in the methodologies of Tocqueville should warrant some pause. To be sure, projects of this nature run a great risk of anachronistic insight, and as such those engaged in this project should be careful not to read too much of Tocqueville into their own worldviews. If, as Professor Ceaser contends, Tocqueville’s analytical framework – his ongoing effort to identify “the prejudices, habits, and dominant passions” that define civic life – can be re-cast to account for the dynamism of Chinese politics, then we must be careful not to bend his worldview and framework so as to break it.

This is not to say that Tocqueville’s bottom-up, boots-on-the-ground type of analysis isn’t warranted – it very much is. (In fact, this project nicely rounds out a spate of recent, less academic texts that explore China from the ground up: James Fallow’s Postcard from Tomorrow Square and Peter Hessler’s Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory, to name a couple of works.) However, scholars should be careful not to tie their findings to the intellectual buoys of Tocqueville’s time. The contributions thus far show no signs of falling victim to this misguided tendency, but the risk remains for future essays.

In the end, I can’t help but laud this project for its audacity and freshness. That it came from a conservative DC think tank – and not a college seminar – makes it doubly admirable.

If any single theme can be threaded through the seemingly disparate contributions outlined above, it is the necessity for further discussion and debate. Taken together, the Tocqueville on China initiative is a forceful effort to bridge the gap between policymakers and academics (and political scientists and historians, for that matter). This is precisely the motivation driving the venture, as the project’s manifesto makes clear, and this is precisely why I draw your attention to the report here.