Two Types of Movement Powers: Labor and Environmental Movements in Taiwan and Korea, 1970-1987.

This paper aims to answer a historical-comparative question, viz., why did Taiwan's environmental movement arise earlier than its labor counterpart, in contrast to Korea, where the labor movement took the lead and the environmental movement followed? The targets of investigation are discrepant performances of labor and environmental movements in the context of late industrialization. This paper uses both countries' labor and environmental disputes from the 1970s to analyze the processes through which Taiwan's anti-pollution and Korea's labor disputes broke out of, and why their counterparts were contained by, the control schemes of authoritarian regimes. The basic argument is that movement specificity matters, particularly the types of power that labor and environmental movements initially depend on. The reverse sequencing of labor and environmental movements in Taiwan and Korea should be understood in terms of the interaction between polity structures and movement powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]