While Sinologists and policy experts study various issues related to today's China--be it, the Chinese economy, its foreign and defense policies, its human rights record, the environment, public health, etc--there has been an insufficient effort to assess these issues in the context of  China’s underlying civic culture. Yet it is precisely this civic culture which will, perhaps as much as anything, tell us how China is likely to develop in the future. With this in mind, we have turned to perhaps the greatest student of civic culture, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose studies of American democracy and pre-revolutionary France still represent the gold standard in terms of elucidating the fundamental civic spirit, the moeurs, of both regimes. In the tradition of Tocqueville's classic studies, AEI's "Tocqueville on China" project will regularly convene a select number of scholars, policy analysts, and government experts to examine key features of current Chinese civic culture and, in turn, generate a series of innovative studies designed to highlight those findings.
 
Tocqueville's methodology was a complex one. It rested on a broad understanding of the character of the regime itself, but did not stop there. Tocqueville insisted on exploring specific aspects of society--be it the law, family, religion, leisure, economics--not only to see how they interrelate with each other but, more importantly, to see how each of these parts adds up to a picture of a civic whole. This approach rested on the assumption that the truth about a society will sometimes reveal itself in the minutest particulars, be it a nation's favorite sport, its architecture, or even the slang its citizens use. Tocqueville strove to understand not only how these parts mirrored the whole, but also how they informed it and, in turn, gave one a sounder understanding of a society and its likely trajectory.
 
The "Tocqueville on China" project involves a series of working groups, each of which explores a different facet of Chinese civic life. In these sessions, participants will attempt to understand the character of the new Chinese citizen.  For example, what role is religion playing--or not playing--in today’s China? Do Tocqueville's "schools of liberty" exist in China? Are the Chinese learning the ethics of the free market, or has the problem of Chinese corruption undermined that evolution? What will be the fate of the family in China, as its current demographic trends play out in the years ahead? Is the proliferation of NGOs creating a nascent activist citizen in China?  These and related questions will be used to address what kind of civic order is developing in China. Will it enhance the chances of liberalization?  Will it engender stability? In short, will China’s civic culture be conducive to heading that country in a direction that is sound, stable and responsible to its own people and the world around it--or not? 
 
As Tocqueville's own studies of the two most modernizing political orders of his time--France and the United States--showed, it matters a great deal how a country's civic order develops. In the case of the United States, the democratic revolution, while not without its problems, evolved into a stable and decent political order; in the case of France, the opposite occurred. What will be China's fate? It is these kinds of questions that need exploring and which will be the core of the "Tocqueville on China" project at AEI.