East Asian Social Networks

In this entry, we review research publications on the forms, contents, and behavioral implications of social networks in East Asia. Although the region geographically consists of Chinese societies (Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan), Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and Mongolia, we focus on the first three nationstate entities where creative scholarship on social networks has been published in English. We have made an effort to include some of the important Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language publications. Readers may consider this review not as a thorough survey of all relevant published works so far, which would require a much greater effort than the one we can give here. Rather, we see ourselves in a position to provide a guideline to the most significant works on the topic; such a guideline will be useful for further research on East Asian social networks in comparative perspective. With this purpose in mind, we will begin with a general characterization of East Asian social networks. Exactly how different are social networks in East Asia as compared to those in contemporary Western countries? In the next three sections, we will review the research of social networks in, respectively, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and Japan and South Korea (thereafter Korea). In the last section, we will offer an assessment of a research agenda on “Network Social Capital in East Asia,” an ongoing collaborative