Tocqueville in China
By Rebecca Liao - May 22, 2013
"Still, reform-minded Chinese can take comfort in the fact that the new treatment of Tocqueville is so misguided as to be useless. Like France, China’s path out of feudalism involved the subdivision of land among the peasantry and the general enrichment of the underclass. New economic rights brought additional burdens like taxes, legal obligations, and a more involved civic role, though not necessarily a sense of civic duty. Political dysfunction stemmed from the monetization of government offices. (In France’s case, the government sold administrative positions and entrenched those who held them much more explicitly.) Rural elections were little more than a ritual, but peasants clung to them as an outlet for political action even as they gladly embraced centralization at the upper levels of government. Any democratic gains made by replacing birth with money as the passport to power met with great resistance from the traditional social hierarchy, at the top of which sat an increasingly irrelevant aristocracy."
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