Over the past three decades, East Asia has been the most successful region of the world in expanding its economy, recovering from financial crises, and enhancing the quality of its citizens’ lives (Fukuyama 2011; Izvorski 2010; Shin and Inoguchi 2009; World Bank 2000, 2003). As a result, it has received a great deal of attention from the global scholarly community and policy circles (Dupont 1996; Hira 2007; C. Kim 2010; Miller 2006). Within the scholarly community, the region is often viewed as a model of socioeconomic and political modernization that is more harmonious, kinder, and gentler than the capitalist liberal democratic model of the West (Bell 2008a; Rozman 2002; Tu 2000). Among policy makers, East Asia is increasingly regarded as a region of powerhouses contending for global superiority (Huntington 1996; Rozman 1991b; Scher 2010).

What distinguishes East Asia from the other parts of Asia, the world's largest continent? Do the countries of East Asia share a cultural heritage or some historical experience that ties or unites them into a cohesive whole? Do they have similar patterns of organizing public and private institutions? Do their citizens exhibit any distinct patterns of thinking or action? The answers to these and other related questions depend on how the term “East Asia” is defined. Although the term has been used for centuries, there is considerable ambiguity regarding its meaning. As a result, East Asia does not always refer to the same collective among and across different professional communities and intellectual circles.

We live in a monumental era for the advancement of democracy. For the first time since its birth in ancient Greece more than two and a half millennia ago, democracy no longer remains confined mostly to socioeconomically advanced countries of the West. Instead, it has become a global phenomenon for the first time in human history. As a set of political ideals as well as political practices, democracy has finally reached every corner of the globe, including the Middle East and North Africa, the two regions known as the most inhospitable to it (Corby 2011; Haerpfer et al. 2009; Huntington 1991; McFaul 2002; Shin 1994, 2007).

Almost everywhere on earth, democracy has emerged as the political system most favored by a large majority of the mass citizenry (Diamond 2008a; Heath et al. 2005; Mattes 2007). More notably, according to Freedom House (2010), the family of democratic states has expanded from 40 member countries to 116 since 1974, when the third wave of democratization began to spread from Southern Europe. Democracies currently account for 60 percent of the world's independent states. Even economically poor and culturally traditional societies, such as Benin and Mali in Africa, have been transformed into functioning liberal democracies. Growing demands from ordinary citizens, along with increased pressures and inducements from international communities, have turned the third wave of democratization into the most successful diffusion of democracy in history.

In all human societies, there is a space in which people interact outside their families and apart from the state. This sphere in which people enter relationships and form associations of their own choosing is the realm of civil society (Alagappa 2004; Diamond 1999). Civil society has both a structural and a cultural dimension (Norris 2002; Putnam 1993). The informal groups and formal organizations that people enter into voluntarily represent the structural dimension of civil society, whereas the values and norms they share with other members of their formal and informal networks constitute civil society's cultural dimension. This chapter focuses on the structural dimension of civil society, exploring it in terms of interpersonal ties and associational activism. In the next chapter, I analyze civil society's cultural dimensions in terms of the shared norms of interpersonal trust and tolerance.

This chapter begins with a brief review of recent developments in the study of civil society. On the basis of this review, I explicate the Confucian notion of civic life and contrast it with the Western liberal model of civic life. I then examine whether the contemporary publics of Confucian Asia remain attached to the classical Confucian model or have embraced the Western liberal model. Next, I estimate the extent to which residents of Confucian Asia join in informal groups and participate in formal associations of various types. Finally, I determine how attachment to Confucian civic traditions affects formal and informal associations independently of other known influences on associational activism.

In the West, for centuries Confucius has been known as the founder of Confucianism, but interestingly, in China where he was born in the small feudal state of Lu and lived his entire life (551–479 B.C), there is no term equivalent to Confucianism (Tu 1998a, 3), nor is there any corresponding term in any of the other East Asian countries where he has been honored and respected as the most influential philosopher and teacher for more than two thousand years. In the sixteenth century, an Italian Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, coined the term “Confucianism” after he Latinized the name “Kong Fuzi” to “Confucius” and introduced to Europeans Confucius's teachings and those of his disciples. Subsequently, Confucianism influenced Voltaire and other European Enlightenment thinkers (Creel 1949, chap. 15; Mungello 1991; see also Collins 2008).

In the West, Confucianism was introduced as China's traditional system of social ethics, which Confucius, Mencius, and their students explicated in the works known as the Confucian classics (Yao 2000, 47–67). The most important of these works are The Analects of Confucius, a collection of conversations, questions, and answers between Confucius and his students, and the seven books of Mencius (371–289 B.C.), who was a principal interpreter and defender of Confucius's teachings. For the past two thousand years, the ideas presented in these two Confucian classics and others, including The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean, have been subjected to different applications and interpretations (Tan 2003a, 7). As a result, Confucianism as a concept has taken on a variety of meanings in different places and at different times (Nosco 2008, 21; Tu 1994, 146–9; see also C. Cheng 2002).

Since the publication of Robert Putnam's (1993) seminal study of civic traditions in Italy, the norms and networks of civic life have been a subject of extensive research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (Hooghe and Stolle 2003; Mishler and Rose 2001, 2005; Newton 2001; Putnam 1993, 2000; van Deth 2007; Warren 1999; Zmerli and Newton 2008). From this research a general consensus has emerged that interpersonal trust and tolerance constitute the key civic norms shaping the quality of public life and the performance of both political and social institutions. Among the scholars who have followed Alexis de Tocqueville's lead in the study of American civic norms and associational activism, there is a growing recognition that no society or polity can survive and thrive for an extended period of time without a trusting and tolerating public (Sander and Putnam 2010, 9; Sharma 2008).

Specifically, trust generalized to strangers has been found to promote the quality of communal life by leading people to cooperate and compromise, to play an active role in their community, and to behave morally (Putnam 1993). It has also been found to facilitate economic development by reducing “transaction costs” in markets (Fukuyama 1995a). Meanwhile, interpersonal tolerance has been understood to improve the quality of democratic government by allowing for a variety of policy alternatives and admitting their criticism (Badescu and Uslaner 2003; Uslaner 2002). In short, interpersonal trust and tolerance are widely recognized in the extant literature on civil society and political culture as the two essential civic norms promoting social cooperation and democratic governance (Jackman and Miller 1998; Theiss-Morse and Hibbing 2005).

More than three decades have passed since the third wave of democratization began spreading from Southern Europe to all other regions of the world in the mid-1970s. In the wake of this wave, most or all of the countries in East, Central, and Southern Europe and in Latin America have been transformed into democracies (Diamond 2011; Haerpfer et al. 2009). In historically Confucian East Asia, where the institutional, cognitive, and behavioral legacies of Confucianism are prevalent, however, the same wave produced only two new democracies – South Korea (Korea hereafter) and Taiwan – and failed to democratize four other nondemocracies: China, North Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam. Moreover, of the two nascent democracies, Taiwan remains a “flawed” democracy even after more than two decades of democratic rule (Economist Intelligence Unit 2010), and Korea has recently moved backward from “free” to “partly free” in press freedom rankings (Freedom House 2011).

Despite all the unprecedented achievements in socioeconomic development and globalization in the region over the past three decades, Confucian East Asia today remains one of the few regions in the world in which nondemocracies prevail over democracies. To explain a lack of democratic development in the region, many scholars and political leaders have promoted Confucian values as Asian values (Tamaki 2007) and have vigorously debated their influence on the democratic transformation of authoritarian regimes in the East Asia region from a variety of disciplinary and ideological perspectives.

Democracy is government by the people. As such, it requires citizens who are informed and active in the political process. In principle, therefore, a democratic government cannot be foisted on citizens who are unwilling to embrace and support it as the preferred alternative to all forms of nondemocratic government. Nor can it, in practice, survive and flourish for an extended period of time unless citizens can recognize its virtues and distinguish democratic practices from undemocratic ones (Griffith et al.1956, 129).

Thus, to survive and develop over time, new democracies – or those that have been democracies for awhile but do not yet function as full democracies – must transform their citizens (Dahl 1997; Dalton 2008; Diamond 1997; Putnam 1993; Shin 2007). The first step in this transformation is education: Citizens must understand what constitutes democracy and be able to differentiate it from its alternatives. The next step is internalization: Citizens must develop a conviction of the virtues of democratic rule, and this conviction must in turn lead to an acceptance of democracy as “the only game in town” (Linz and Stepan 1996). Only with informed and continuing support from the mass citizenry can limited democracies grow into fully functioning democracies (Rose and Shin 2001). Those citizens who express such support can be called democrats with a small “d” – functioning citizens of a democratic state.