East Asian Society Research Paper

The study of societies in East Asia crosses disciplinary boundaries. Given the importance of state policies, it is not surprising that political scientists often play a large role, treating values through political culture, social change through campaigns and policy initiatives, and civil society through state controls. Historians are notable too; after all, links between past and present figure in many explanations of social problems and successes. Anthropologists are in the foreground in the many analyses of family and community, often central even in discussions of modernization. While sociologists until recently have counted as but one part of a large mix of researchers, they have gained prominence at the extremes: articulating the models of development that have worked in the region and exposing the serious social problems that threaten further development. Their research, along with historians in the 1960s–1970s, highlighted preconditions for modernization, along with political scientists in the 1980s and 1990s, analyzed social movements and values, and together with anthropologists of late has focused on the social exchange and networks that allow informal ties to prevail over formal institutions.

Transformation in East Asia rarely was imposed from outside or reflected domestic class struggle. Administrative continuity under Confucian principles allowed top-down change to dominate. Over time, three transformative forces began at the top and were redirected from below. Bureaucratization occurred as at first itinerant officials such as Confucius in the sixth century BC offered their services and later powerful emperors or shoguns built multilayered staffs. This process drove the spread of male literacy and examinations in China and Korea, as public service became the source of honor and often wealth. It also transformed feudalism in Japan as vassals learned to serve their lords in administrative tasks. Yet, leaders relied on moral suasion and community self-administration, keeping the size of the bureaucracy down.

Urbanization spread, beginning with Chinese walled cities as outposts of administration. The role of these cities changed as they gradually reorganized within regional networks of cities linked by numerous rural periodic markets and legally unfettered migration. Controls in Japan were tighter, but when daimyo accelerated the concentration of samurai in castle towns as warring states gave way to economic competitors, Japan’s urbanization after 1600 far overtook that of China. Eased by coastal transportation, a national market ensued. While intra-regional ties as well as global ties were curtailed in East Asia, strong state support and growing commercialization made Edo (Tokyo) and Beijing the world’s largest cities in the eighteenth century (Rozman 1974).

Confucianism also was embraced at the top and then spread widely through education and family-based rituals, guiding mass as well as elite social practices in scattered communities. There was no religious hierarchy. Although rice cultivation required village cooperation, the family was relatively free to pursue opportunities in landownership, commerce, or education except for limitations in Japan on social class mobility. In China, the population climbed to 400 million or nearly a third of the world’s total in 1850. In Japan, with about one-tenth as many people, decentralized rule through more than 250 domains spurred regional competition, allowing some domains to move ahead in development. Four led in seizing power soon after the US forced open the country and in centralizing Japan under the emperor through massive reforms that resulted in rapid modernization. A social transformation came from part of the old elite inspired by a new nationalism. Studying which of the leading industrial countries excelled in each area, they borrowed widely, abolishing closed social classes, pursuing universal education, and building a national bureaucracy based on a modern university system with rigorous entrance examinations. Free of the rigid imperial Confucianism in China, Japan could draw on tradition flexibly to meet the challenge of the West (Rozman 1991).

As precocious as East Asian societies had been— with China in the forefront of global development from 500–1500 AD, and Japan and Korea gaining in dynamism—they lacked some forces that enabled the rise of the West (Rozman 1981). In long-lasting dynasties, each was ruled for continuity and stability with little impetus from foreign trade or thought, religious minorities, or intellects that questioned Confucianism. Once obliged to change, however, Japan and later China and Korea could tap some promising traditions. Bureaucracies of the educated elite were useful in latecomers to modernization catching up via reforms from the top. Urban and commercial traditions nurtured an entrepreneurial spirit. Family initiative and paternalistic organization reached across the population despite traditions of deference to the state, respect for elders, and subservience of women that limited the scope of change. In Japan, habits of loyalty to lords proved convenient when new leaders pursued reform. In China it took longer to activate and unite challengers to authority.

Japan’s transition was fastest, relying on more intense bureaucratization, higher rates of urbanization, and a combination of Confucianism and the samurai code of obedience and honor (Black et al. 1975). While Japanese society experienced most of the changes usually associated with development, there were important differences (Dore 1967). Administrative guidance at crucial times accelerated modernization and left society more vertically organized and dependent. Recitation of the imperial rescript on education inculcated a sense of duty rather than a questioning civil society. The decision in 1898 to model the civil code on samurai family ideals reinforced a patriarchal family intended to restrain deviance. The state took a harsh stand in the face of social problems such as tenant disputes and urban riots, stressing an ideology of harmony and reliance on go-betweens in conflict resolution. It turned to repression to counter the popularity of socialist ideas. As nationalism fueled wars and colonialism, the state asserted new powers, for instance, organizing ward associations for surveillance and mobilization. Loyal conscripts and diligent workers made success possible in building a centralized, industrial power able to dominate Korea and move ever more aggressively against China. Yet, an emerging middle class was ready for reform.

As the imperial center in Beijing’s Forbidden City retarded reform, Chinese society failed to modernize. It took much longer for alternative power centers to emerge, and they were left divided by warlordism across a vast country. After imperial examinations were ended in 1905 literacy rates stagnated despite the appearance of modern schools. Treaty ports and the sudden rise of Shanghai as the leading city gave foreigners high visibility, but failed to spur urbanization. Criticisms of Confucianism as a cause of backwardness reinforced attacks against female foot-binding, elite cultural aloofness, and growing inequality in the villages. Japanese aggression plunged the country into war, exacerbating social problems. Accustomed to regarding their country as the center of the world, Chinese searched for a new source of pride. Communists rode the coat-tails of nationalism and land reform to power.

The period of 1945–55 shifted the direction of social change in each of the East Asian societies. Defeat exposed the falsity in wartime rhetoric to Japanese and brought support for many of the reforms imposed by the US Occupation. Policies to create a democratic society included land reform, coeducation, increased equal rights in the family, decentralization, and freedoms for the society in dealing with the state. Although Japanese ways of implementation soon limited the impact of some of these changes and elements of wartime centralization led in the recovery, the results were far-reaching and favorable for social harmony and national development. China’s communists were far more radical, aggressively targeting reputed class enemies in land reform and urban reorganization. They stifled traditional society and sprouts of capitalism as the reach of the state extended downward. Yet, the enormous scale of the society and the limited modern resources available to the state forced compromises. At first, these were promises of gradual application of the Soviet model such as collectivization. Later, even after many excesses of radicalism, they were impatient calls for more extreme changes to compensate for what was missing.

Postwar development started as top down in all of the East Asian states except Hong Kong under British administration. Taiwan started with tension between the newly arrived mainlanders and the local residents who had fared better than Koreans under Japanese rule. Yet, reforms gave scope to a dynamic society as entrepreneurs expanded family enterprises and US educated professionals brought high-tech exports to the fore. In South Korea a strong state at first stymied the business community, but then colluded with a small number of chaebols to promote rapid growth. Of course, the top-down approach went furthest under communism: in China, where the Soviet model was applied in the 1950s, and in North Korea, where more extreme social mobilization and isolation remained unchanged.

The Japanese postwar model of modernization inspired the rest of the region to double-digit growth. Three types of ‘Confucian capitalists’ rose to the fore. First, were the elite officials chosen after examination competition to the best universities and working long hours while their wives devoted themselves to a supportive home and education of the next generation. Second, were the salarymen whose entry into large corporations rested on a similar background. Companies fostered lifetime employment through seniority wages, small work groups that socialized together, and inculcation of identity to company rather than to profession. Third, were small family enterprises, which even in Japan employed a disproportionate number of people. This model succeeded as long as young people gave up their adolescence for rote memorization, women accepted brief working careers as office girls before marriage, and salarymen gave priority to company over family and leisure (Rohlen 1989, Brinton 1993). It benefited from widespread belief in the fairness of exams for social mobility and in the existence of a middle class seen as embracing 90 percent of Japanese.

As rates of growth slowed and productivity became increasingly dependent on creativity, Japanese lost confidence in their model. Young people became engrossed in pop culture, the burden of one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations raised new demands for social welfare, women sought careers, and men preferred leisure. Society was converging with the West. The Japanese media touted the urgency of a third wave of reforms comparable to those of the Meiji era and the Occupation. Yet, vested interests blocked decentralization as well as other means to far-reaching reform. ‘Internationalization’ remains an elusive ideal for people used to all-encompassing in-groups rather than individualism (Sugimoto 1997).

Under communist rule, life in China was jolted by a quarter of a century of social experimentation. Starting with land reform, all citizens were assigned class labels that determined their opportunities in life and left them vulnerable to periodic campaigns and collective punishment. In the Great Leap Forward, people’s communes for a time even threatened family life with collective day care and mess halls. Extreme forms of thought control relying on Mao’s little red book and on sending officials and intellectuals to the countryside for re-education accompanied the Cultural Revolution. The result was a dossier society, where criticism and self-criticism in small groups politicized daily life. Yet, despite forced relocation of millions of teenagers from the cities and the havoc in education from attacks on experts, conditions of life and work were mostly frozen. Workers were assigned an organization claiming broad control over all aspects of life with little hope for mobility (Walder 1986). Peasants could not leave the commune after urban–rural differences became fixed. Some indicators such as life expectancy and literacy improved rapidly, but urbanization stalled. Ideological claims to be building a pure socialist society in contrast to Western capitalism and Soviet revisionism were based on concealment of social problems and arbitrary authority. When Red Guards were unleashed to beat their teachers and denounce their parents, it appeared that campaigns against Confucianism were in fact reversing Chinese traditions. In fact, most people coped with pressures from above by turning to family for support. Without much modernization of life or, in rural areas, support from the state, Chinese retained many traditional attitudes (Parish and Whyte 1978).

From 1978, the Chinese mainland turned to a different model of development already successful in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Orru et al. 1997). To some extent, this resulted from the pragmatism of leaders who had suffered through Mao Zedong’s radicalism and were now bent on winning popular support and catching up. Even more, it was a tribute to the resilience of Chinese society. As commune controls were relaxed, villagers reinvigorated the family farm, then seized opportunities to develop township and village enterprises, and finally flocked to the cities as the ‘floating population’ ready for any onerous job even if the state forced them to accept a temporary status without ordinary benefits. The state favored coastal areas, initially in the Southeast, with special economic zones (Solinger 1999). Not only did inequalities across China widen abruptly, many social groups felt unfairly treated. Personal connections, including bribery, determined life chances for many. Eager to sustain the monopoly of the communist party and hostile to a free press and independent judiciary, China’s leadership failed to address problems of corruption. As society became increasing materialistic, it also lost more of its spiritual moorings. While some flaunted their new wealth, others searched for new values in the West or in religion. The state had some success in countering this with nationalism, portraying China as long humiliated by the West and newly contained by US hegemonism.

After social class labels were dropped and millions were rehabilitated, Chinese regained many freedoms despite some significant limitations. With the end of rationing and easier movement, urbanization doubled. Authorities sought to channel part of the influx into small cities or townships. With the return of competitive examinations, a meritocracy re-emerged and bureaucracies became more technocratic; yet power in some localities rested with party leaders who behaved as petty tyrants. Barriers to markets were dropped, and entrepreneurship flourished. Workers could now move from one job to another, but the state continued to provide loans to state-owned enterprises deeply in debt in order to limit layoffs and demonstrations by workers and pensioners whose housing and other benefits depended on these firms. The state sought to channel interest groups, authorizing professional associations and trade unions subject to its influence. Scared by the large demonstrations led by students in 1989 and by the example of the Soviet Union, China’s communist party allowed more safety valves in popular culture and materialism while putting the lid on a civil society. Ethnic minorities, which were concentrated mostly in the west and south, were not much assimilated. Outnumbered ten to one by Han Chinese, they were no longer subject to the decimation of the Cultural Revolution and allowed to revive many customs as long as no political organization posed a challenge. Contradictions mounted between rising middle class aspirations in coastal urban areas and local corporatism in which networks linked to officials protected business arrangements.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea influenced China not only by their own ascent as middle-class societies, but also by their transfer of business practices through direct investment to nearby regions of the mainland. Foreign firms spread new management practices—a sharp shift from the inefficient socialist egalitarianism and clientelism in the factory. For many young migrants, exploitation in the form of long hours and few benefits took its toll quickly, but an endless supply of surplus labor from the countryside was ready to replace them. Multinational corporations spread high-tech business as well, drawing many urban professionals into the information age. After television had spread rapidly and popular culture was bringing Taiwan and Hong Kong together with the mainland in Greater China, the Internet became the new force of internationalization. Yet, in a population nearing 1.3 billion in the year 2000, over 80 percent remained well removed from a modern lifestyle. For most of rural and inland China, state-controlled television provided the main source of internationalization. A wide gulf still separated urban and rural. Despite stringent family planning since the 1970s when the state imposed a one-child policy, later relaxed to permit two children in some rural families, the workforce continued to grow so fast that only a high economic growth rate could meet the need for jobs. A return to household and community control of labor exposed the inferior status of women. So, too, did the struggle to have a son in the countryside. While all over East Asia aging populations and low birth rates were threatening to impose a great cost in social welfare, the costs in China would come later but with even less of an economic cushion from national pension and healthcare systems.

In the year 2000, contrasts abound in East Asia. In North Korea years of famine and total isolation from the outside leave a totalitarian society in desperation. In the Pacific coast megalopolis dominated by Tokyo high incomes bring many of the problems of affluence. Except for Koreans brought to Japan before 1945 and ex-patriots in Hong Kong after it was transferred from British rule, few foreigners live in any of the East Asian societies. While guest workers on a small and regulated scale have begun to come to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea to fill the dirtiest jobs, they are outsiders. Disparities slow regionalism as well as globalization. Calls for a common identity based on Confucian heritage or Asian values confront distrust left by Japan’s insensitive handling of its legacy of war crimes and China’s nationalist pressure to regain Taiwan and expand its power without assurances of democratic evolution.

Recent research explores the impact of accelerated globalization on East Asian societies. On Japan and Korea, domestic and foreign experts warn that a new model of development is required. They show limitations in educational creativity, bottom-up entrepreneurship, and competition free of administrative guidance. On China, foreign specialists are split between those who recognize the unexpected adaptability of a communist-led system still able to achieve high growth rates after the Asian financial crisis and those who point to mounting frustration among farmers and workers in an era of unbridled exploitation over much of the country. Both sides have come to recognize a model of family-based enterprise through ‘Greater China’ challenged by both the larger-scale and more transparent operations of a new era and the lingering fetters on initiative left in West China and other areas bypassed by the recent dynamism.

On the one hand, borderlessness should bring hightech urban agglomerations such as Beijing through Seoul to Tokyo or Taipei-Hong Kong-Guangzhou. On the other hand, civil societies remain weak, and state power combines with deep historical scars to make nationalism strong. New-age materialists are succeeding older generations socialized to forego self-gratification in times of far less modernization. As dating and divorce spread, single-child families are challenging traditional solidarity. Organizational paternalism with lifetime employment is fading. Still trying to guide social change, states face a powerful combination from bottom-up social forces inspired by global information and linked to the global economy. While many Confucian elements endure in social life, the challenges to top-down control are greater than ever. The need for deeper research on what occurs behind formal institutional facades is also greater than ever. While scholars have extended empirical studies and are armed with more theoretical models, there is still a dearth of research that reveals the hidden mechanisms in societies still not known for their transparency.

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