Labour militancy in Taiwan: Export integration vs authoritarian transition

Abstract

Taiwan started export industrialization in the early 1960s. After twenty-five years of steady economic growth, this society for the first time witnessed extensive media coverage of labor militancy in the late 1980s. How can this occurrence be appropriately explained? Does it confirm the inevitability of labor militancy under an export economy? In search of answers to these questions, this article aims to achieve two goals. Firstly, it attempts to show that though the early Latin American experience of export integration was usually accompanied by labor militancy, export industrialization itself would not always be associated with the deterioration of living standards and increasing material hardships. Secondly, it uses evidence from Taiwan's experiences to contradict the conventional argument that the export integration of an underdeveloped country into the capitalist world system would inevitably give rise to a labor movement oriented at radical revolutions.

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