ABSTRACT
By now it is widely acknowledged that modernization manifested itself differently in East Asian societies than in the West (Rofel 1999; Jackson et al. 2008; Yan 2010a; Beck and Beck-Gernshein 2003). There were undeniably superficial similarities in modernity’s effects on certain social phenomena in both East Asian and Western cultures. Just as the West did, East Asia experienced increases in women’s education levels and rate of participation in the labor force, a delay in marriage age, lower birth rates, and smaller family size. However, in East Asian societies these phenomena were actually shaped by different local forces and culturally specific contexts. Modernization in East Asia was the product of a continuous tension between the local culture’s efforts to model itself after Western modernity and its deliberate intent to establish its own identity, independent of Western influence. In understanding East Asian modernity, the social consequences of what Western scholars have characterized as the results of globalization and flexible accumulation of capital must be examined through a different cultural lens. Western scholars tend to emphasize the great value modernism places on individuality and the power of this newly realized individualism to transform intimate relationships in such a way that the patriarchal tradition comes to an end, opening a pathway toward a post-modern and post-traditionalist society (Giddens 1991; Castells 1997; Bauman 2001; Beck 1992). East Asian scholars, on the other hand, are more concerned with how various players in the modernization process have utilized and re-created the concept of “tradition” to cope with rapidly changing political and economic realities.
