The Impact of Urbanization on Social Networks

The social element of this sort of everyday repression works best when there are tight social communities. One of the things that I heard from friends whose parents had to move in into a high rise in Beijing or Shanghai is they felt like it disintegrated social connections. As China urbanizes over time, as people get shuffled and then into different districts and so on, it will be more and more difficult, I think, to exercise social capital to conduct the same sort of depression.