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The Social Effects of Ethnic Diversity at the Local Level: A Natural Experiment with Exogenous Residential Allocation

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Relying on diversity measures computed at the apartment block level under conditions of exogenous allocation of public housing in France, this paper identifies the effects of ethnic diversity on social relationships and housing quality. Housing Survey data reveal that diversity induces social anomie. Through the channel of anomie, diversity accounts for the inability of residents to sanction others for vandalism and to act collectively to demand proper building maintenance. However, anomie also lowers opportunities for violent confrontations, which are not related to diversity.

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Journal of Political Economy
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David Laitin
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3
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How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers

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What types of asylum seekers are Europeans willing to accept? We conducted a conjoint experiment asking 18,000 eligible voters in 15 European countries to evaluate 180,000 profiles of asylum seekers that randomly varied on nine attributes. Asylum seekers who have higher employability, have more consistent asylum testimonies and severe vulnerabilities, and are Christian rather than Muslim received the greatest public support. These results suggest that public preferences over asylum seekers are shaped by sociotropic evaluations of their potential economic contributions, humanitarian concerns about the deservingness of their claims, and anti-Muslim bias. These preferences are similar across respondents of different age, education, income, and political ideology, as well as across the surveyed countries. This public consensus on what types of asylum seekers to accept has important implications for theory and policy.

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The French Enlightenment Network

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“What was the Enlightenment” is a question scholars have been asking since the eighteenth century, but far less often has it been asked who the Enlightenment was. Who were the members of the social, professional, and academic classes that made up the Enlightenment? Who was in and, by extension, who was out? Much is known about the primary producers of Enlightenment works, from the famed philosophes to some of the lesser-known authors (e.g., in France, the Encyclopédistes, the Grub Street writers, or the libellistes).1 Studies have also revealed some of the readers of Enlightenment texts and explored some of its social institutions. And a certain degree of attention has been paid to the major patrons and political supporters of the philosophes: Mme de Pompadour, Frederick the Great, and other influential governmental officials such as Malesherbes. But rarely, if ever, have the different participants of the Enlightenment been considered together as a single entity, or, as we would say today, a network.

That is the goal of this article: to study the social composition of the French Enlightenment network. What sectors of eighteenth-century society were most present? How involved was the government? What role did the aristocracy play? Which intellectual disciplines and fields were most represented? Which ones were not? What was the role of women? And, perhaps most critically, how did it function as a network? These are the kinds of questions we raise, and we seek to answer them by means of a hybrid quantitative and qualitative methodology. We use basic statistical calculations to provide rough estimates of the size and importance of different social groups; given the nature of our data, however, we do not analyze them with standard social network analysis (SNA) methods. Rather, we corroborate, refine, and defend our findings through comparisons with arguments from the secondary literature. While our reasons for this approach are largely driven by the shape of our data (which make most SNA metrics unfeasible), we also advocate a method of network analysis that does not rely on mapping relationships between nodes and calculating such metrics as betweenness centrality or clustering coefficients; rather, it focuses on the relative size of, and overlap between, different subgroups in order to understand the overall structure and social composition of a historical network.

While some of our findings, detailed in full below, will not come as a surprise to specialists (the network is, for instance, overwhelmingly male), the overall picture of the French Enlightenment network that emerges from this study is nonetheless striking. Two features in particular stand out. First, men and women of science are significantly underrepresented. The scholars and writers we find in this network were largely gens de lettres, much more engaged with history, philosophy, political economy, and literature than with mathematics, medicine, or astronomy. Second, the elite segments of society, be they aristocratic, social, or governmental, are remarkably overrepresented. The French Enlightenment network incorporates the crème de la crème of the French state and high society. The presence of so many notables in this network suggests that French Enlightenment authors were more likely to be engaged in collaborative, reformist efforts than in subversive plots; conversely, it also hints at the existence of a fairly extensive and well-represented (at different levels of social hierarchy) parti philosophique within the French state itself.

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"In Search of Perfect Consonance"

Twenty-five years ago, China was at war with Vietnam, the Chinese and the Japanese were at loggerheads and relations across the Taiwan Strait were frosty.

Directed by Oscar® winner Ruby Yang, In Search of Perfect Consonance profiles the Asian Youth Orchestra, established against this historical backdrop with the aim of connecting the region’s young people through music. 

As we watch the budding musicians of today’s Asia learn to work together, we are reminded of the higher ideals that music inspires.

 

Official Website: consonance-movie.com

For more information, please email to perfectconsonance.movie@gmail.com

 

Film Screenings

Gerald Sim

616 Serra StreetEncina Hall E301Stanford, CA94305-6055
(650) 723-8429 (650) 723-6530
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gerald_sim.jpg Ph.D.
Gerald Sim joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center for the Autumn 2016 quarter from Florida Atlantic University's School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, where he is an associate professor of film and media studies. He arrived in Palo Alto immediately after a summer as Visiting Senior Research Fellow funded by the Luce Foundation, at the Asia Research Institute's Inter-Asia Engagements cluster in Singapore. It was his second stint at ARI; he was also a Fellow in the Cultural Studies cluster in 2013. During his time at Shorenstein APARC as Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, he will be researching and writing for his current book tentatively titled, Besides Hybridity: Postcolonial Poetics of Southeast Asian Cinema, contracted with Indiana University Press. The book uses the region's unique colonial history to conceive of postcolonial aesthetics beyond the usual tropes of hybridity and syncretism, while attending to an understudied but thriving segment of world cinema. Individual chapters explore Singapore's spatial imagination, Malaysian soundscapes, and Indonesian cinema's relationship to genre. Sim is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), a Neo-Marxian evaluation of film studies' engagements with race. His other writing on diverse topics such as Japanese cinema, film music theory, Edward Said, digital cinematography, and CNBC personality Jim Cramer have been published in Asian Cinema, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Discourse, Projections, and Rethinking Marxism.  He holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa, and a BS in Biology from Duke.
Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2016-17
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Walder receives award for Cultural Revolution research

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Portrait of Prof. Andrew Walder

Stanford professor Andrew Walder has been awarded the Founder’s Prize from the journal Social Science History for his paper, “Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971.” The journal’s editorial board selects one recipient annually for exemplary scholarly work.

Using data from 2,213 historical county and city annals, the paper charts the breadth of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, its evolution through time and the repression through which state structures were rebuilt in the post-Mao era.

Walder, who is a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director emeritus of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has long studied the sources of conflict, stability and change in communist regimes. He recently published China under Mao, a book that explores the rise and fall of Mao Zedong’s radical socialism.

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Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan

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Accidental State

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The existence of two Chinese states—one controlling mainland China, the other controlling the island of Taiwan—is often understood as a seemingly inevitable outcome of the Chinese civil war. Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the “Two Chinas” dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. Accidental State challenges this conventional narrative to offer a new perspective on the founding of modern Taiwan.

Hsiao-ting Lin marshals extensive research in recently declassified archives to show that the creation of a Taiwanese state in the early 1950s owed more to serendipity than careful geostrategic planning. It was the cumulative outcome of ad hoc half-measures and imperfect compromises, particularly when it came to the Nationalists’ often contentious relationship with the United States.

Taiwan’s political status was fraught from the start. The island had been formally ceded to Japan after the First Sino–Japanese War, and during World War II the Allies promised Chiang that Taiwan would revert to Chinese rule after Japan’s defeat. But as the Chinese civil war turned against the Nationalists, U.S. policymakers reassessed the wisdom of backing Chiang. The idea of placing Taiwan under United Nations trusteeship gained traction. Cold War realities, and the fear of Taiwan falling into Communist hands, led Washington to recalibrate U.S. policy. Yet American support of a Taiwan-based Republic of China remained ambivalent, and Taiwan had to eke out a place for itself in international affairs as a de facto, if not fully sovereign, state.

 

Biography

Hsiao-ting Lin is a research fellow and curator of the East Asia Collection at the Hoover Institution. He holds a BA in political science from National Taiwan University (1994) and an MA in international law and diplomacy from National Chengchi University in Taiwan (1997). He received his DPhil in oriental studies in 2003 from the University of Oxford, where he also held an appointment as tutorial fellow in modern Chinese history. In 2003–4, Lin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley. In 2004, he was awarded the Kiriyama Distinguished Fellowship by the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. In 2005–7, he was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he participated in Hoover’s Modern China Archives and Special Collections project. In April 2008, Lin was elected a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for his contributions to the studies of modern China’s history.

Lin’s academic interests include ethnopolitics and minority issues in greater China, border strategies and defenses in modern China, political institutions and the bureaucratic system of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), and US-Taiwan military and political relations during the Cold War. He has published extensively on modern Chinese and Taiwanese politics, history, and ethnic minorities, including Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (Harvard University Press, 2016); Modern China’s Ethnic Frontiers: A Journey to the West (Routledge, 2011); Breaking with the Past: The Kuomintang Central Reform Committee on Taiwan, 1950–52 (Hoover Press, 2007); Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928–49 (UBC Press, 2006), nominated as the best study in the humanities at the 2007 International Convention of Asia Scholars; and over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes, reviews, opinion pieces, and translations. He is currently at work on a manuscript that reevaluates Taiwan’s relations with China and the United States during the presidency of Harry Truman to that of Jimmy Carter.

 

This event is sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. It is free and open to the public, and lunch will be served. Please RSVP by November 28.

Reuben Hills Conference Room

2nd Floor, Encina Hall East

Hsiao-ting Lin Librarian, East Asian Archives, Hoover Institution
Lectures

Taiwan's Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years

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Taiwan's Democracy Challenged

This discussion will be based on the authors' recently published book, Taiwan's Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years, Lynne Rienner Publishing (2016).

Abstract

At the end of Chen Shui-bian’s two terms as the president of Taiwan, his tenure was widely viewed as a disappointment, if not an outright failure. Today, the Chen years (2000-2008) are remembered mostly for relentless partisan fighting over cross-Strait relations and national identity questions, prolonged political gridlock, and damaging corruption scandals—as an era that challenged, rather than helped consolidate, Taiwan’s young democracy and squandered most of the promise with which it began.

Yet as Taiwan’s Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years documents, this conventional narrative obscures a more complex and more positive story. The chapters here cover the diverse array of ways in which democratic practices were deepened during this period, including the depoliticization of the military and intelligence forces, the ascendance of an independent and professional judicial system, a strengthened commitment to constitutionalism and respect for the rule of law, and the creation of greater space for civil society representatives in the policy-making process. Even the conventional wisdom about unprecedented political polarization during this era is misleading: while elite politics became more divided and acrimonious, mass public opinion on cross-Strait relations and national identity was actually converging.

Not all developments were so positive: strong partisans on both sides of the political divide remained only weakly committed to democratic principles, the reporting of news organizations became more sensationalist and partisan, and the Taiwanese state’s exceptional autonomy from sectoral interests and vaunted capacity for long-term planning deteriorated. But on the whole, the authors argue, these years were not squandered. By the end of the Chen Shui-bian era, Taiwan’s democracy was firmly consolidated. 

 

This event is sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. It is free and open to the public, and lunch will be served. Please RSVP by October 31.

Taiwan's Democracy Challenged presentation slides
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CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall 2nd Floor

Larry Diamond

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Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Larry Diamond Senior Fellow and Principal Investigator, Taiwan Democracy Project
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Taiwan’s China Dilemma: Contested Identities and Multiple Interests in Taiwan’s Cross-Strait Economic Policy

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This talk will be based on Professor Lin's new book, Taiwan's China Dilemma: Contested Identities and Multiple Interests in Taiwan's Cross-Strait Economic Policy, Stanford University Press (2016). 

 

Abstract

China and Taiwan share one of the world's most complex international relationships. Although their similar cultures and complementary economies promoted an explosion of commercial ties since the late 1980s, they have not led to a stable political relationship, let alone progress toward the unification that both governments once claimed to seek. In addition, Taiwan’s economic policy toward China has alternated between liberalization and restriction. Most recently, Taiwan's Sunflower Movement succeeded in obstructing deeper economic ties with China. Why has Taiwan's policy toward China been so controversial and inconsistent?

Author Syaru Shirley Lin explains the divergence between the development of economic and political relations across the Taiwan Strait and the oscillation of Taiwan’s cross-Strait economic policy through the interplay of national identity and economic interests. She shows how the debate over Taiwanese national identity has been intimately linked to Taiwan’s economic policy during a turbulent time in cross-Strait relations. Using primary sources, opinion surveys, and interviews with Taiwanese opinion leaders, she paints a vivid picture of one of the most unsettled and dangerous relationships in the contemporary world.

As Taiwan grapples with the growing importance of the Chinese economy, it also experiences the uneven socio-economic consequences of globalization. This has produced a reconsideration of the desired degree of further integration with China, especially among the younger generations. Taiwan’s China Dilemma illustrates the growing backlash against economic liberalization and regional economic integration around the world.

 

Biography

Shirley Lin

Syaru Shirley Lin teaches political science at the University of Virginia and is a member of the founding faculty of the master’s program in global political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her book, Taiwan’s China Dilemma: Contested Identities and Multiple Interests in Taiwan's Cross-Strait Economic Policy, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. She graduated from Harvard College and earned her masters and Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong. Before starting her academic career, Prof. Lin was a partner at Goldman Sachs, where she was responsible for direct investment in Asia and spearheaded the firm’s investments in many technology start-ups such as Alibaba and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. Previously, she specialized in the privatization of state-owned enterprises in Singapore and China. Prof. Lin’s present board service includes Goldman Sachs Asia Bank, Langham Hospitality Investments and Mercuries Life Insurance. She also advises Crestview Partners and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation and is a member of the Hong Kong Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation.

 

This event is sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. It is free and open to the public, and lunch will be served. Please RSVP by October 17.

CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor

Syaru Shirley Lin Professor of Political Economy Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Virginia
Lectures

A way to bridge aging societies in Japan and South Korea

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Gi-Wook Shin
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Japan and South Korea face serious demographic crises. Japan has the oldest population in the world and South Korea is one of the most rapidly aging. Together they top the list in terms of proportion of elderly by 2050, with 40.1% and 35.9% respectively being 65 and over, according to a U.S. Census Bureau forecast. Both nations are seeing shrinking working-age populations, with their birthrates among the lowest in the world. This puts them at great risk as they struggle to find new engines of economic growth.

Some experts argue that Japan and South Korea should encourage immigration. The former head of Tokyo's Immigration Bureau, Hidenori Sakanaka, said that "we need an immigration revolution to bring in 10 million people in the next 50 years, otherwise the Japanese economy will collapse." Jongryn Mo, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul has written a book, "Strong Immigration Nation," urging a similar policy for South Korea.

Is migration the answer?

Japan and South Korea are already supplementing their shrinking workforce with foreign labor, mostly unskilled migrant workers from China and Southeast Asia doing jobs that locals shun.

But it is time to attract more skilled workers. In Japan, only 18.4% of foreign workers were technicians or professionals in 2015, while the figure in Korea is just 7.8% this year. Skilled foreign workers can fill many jobs from staffing hospitals to working as technicians in middle-tier companies and software engineers in large ones.

The challenge, however, is that both countries remain exclusionary, closed societies despite a substantial rise in the numbers of foreigners. Politicians fear losing votes from workers worried about foreigners taking their jobs.

According to a recent report by the French business school INSEAD, Japan and South Korea are ranked 53rd and 61st, respectively in their level of tolerance for immigrants. Most foreign skilled workers have little intention to settle down in Japan or South Korea on a permanent basis, although unskilled ones might be more willing to stay.

Maria, a Guatemalan professional, decided to leave South Korea after working for six years in the overseas marketing department of a large Korean corporation. "Some Koreans complain that foreigners leave after a few years, but we leave because we're never included in the first place. Korean companies pay a lot to bring foreigners here. And then they don't even ask these people about their opinion."

Srey, a Cambodian student studying in Japan, said, "The Japanese are very helpful and very friendly, but at the same time they look at me as a 'gaijin' no matter how good I am at Japanese or able to speak to them. I am not planning to work in Japan."

Bridging strategy

South Korea and Japan need to find a more creative strategy in utilizing foreign talent. In particular, they should pay close attention to their transnational networks rather than pushing for permanent migration. Not only should both countries focus on the knowledge and skills of foreign labor talent, but also the social networks they can possess.

This calls for a particular type of social capital: transnational bridging. A person who has social ties in more than one place can serve as a bridge between those different places. Such bridging can be performed within a city or a country or across borders, but the latter is becoming more important with globalization. By bridging distant networks, people can connect disparate cultures, build trust and facilitate cross-national cooperation that are essential in business transactions. Many Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs and engineers working in Silicon Valley are active in transnational bridging with their home country.

Transnational bridging can be a good new strategy for South Korea and Japan in attracting foreign skilled labor since they can offer valuable experiences and networks as advanced economies, if not permanent places to live. They can help foreign talent to build social ties while studying and working and encourage them to serve as a bridge between South Korea and Japan and their next destination once they leave in what could be called "brain linkage."

They can still contribute to South Korea or Japan even after they depart. Maria said she was willing to do business involving both South Korea and her home country. Srey is also eager to do business with Japan after graduating, even though he will not work in the country.

South Korea and Japan should adopt a policy of "Study-Work-Bridge" rather than the "Study-Work-Migration" pathway commonly encouraged by settler societies. This new policy framework would establish programs providing systematic networking opportunities for skilled foreigners while in Japan or South Korea. It would upgrade the quality of campus life for foreign students and work environments for foreign professionals so they leave with positive experiences.

Most importantly, it would provide institutional support to help maintain transnational networks between foreigners and South Koreans and Japanese.

In Japan, a Study-Work framework has already begun to take shape. Among foreign students seeking employment in Japan in 2013, approximately 24% found jobs. According to the country's ministry of justice, 10,696 of 11,698 foreign students are successful in applying for a change of visa status after graduating from college. This is very encouraging. Still, foreign students feel that Japanese companies are reluctant to embrace their full potential and largely expect them to assimilate, often leading them to stay in Japan only for a short time.

In South Korea, with a shorter history of foreign student intake, a Study-Work framework has yet to emerge. While 64.3% of South Korean companies say they need and want to hire foreign students, only a very small portion of foreign students work in South Korean companies after graduation, perhaps as low as 1%. South Korea's immigration laws for foreign students have eased slightly in recent years, but there is an urgent need to develop solid, institutionalized support for responding to the substantial demand by foreign students who wish to find employment after their studies.

Challenges ahead

Both countries are moving in the right direction, but until they are ready to embrace a more comprehensive migration policy down the road, they should develop the "bridging" component of a Study-Work-Bridge framework as an interim strategy. That means considering how foreign skilled labor can contribute to their economies even if they stay only temporarily.

This non-migration-bridging concept can be also appealing to foreign workers who like to move on after gaining valuable experiences and networks. By activating the social networks they have left behind, foreigners can later become powerful "transnational bridges." With economic globalization, such linkages will be all the more important.

Research shows that science and engineering majors may have more to contribute as human capital, but business and social science majors are more inclined to play a bridging role. Universities and corporations should establish diversity offices, as seen in the U.S. and elsewhere, to promote a culture of tolerance and non-discrimination.

The challenges associated with aging, depopulation and a shrinking workforce are expected to intensify in the coming years. Yet foreign talent is readily at hand for both countries. They need to look no further than the skilled foreigners who already have connections with South Korea or Japan either through schooling or employment and to continue to cultivate such connections through a Study-Work-Bridge approach.

Gi-Wook Shin is director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University and co-author of Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea. Rennie J. Moon is an associate professor at the Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul.

This article was originally carried by Nikkei Asian Review on Aug. 31 and reposted with permission.

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Two elderly women chat at a park in Kyoto, Japan.
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