Taiwan: the organized labour movement and its obstacles

In Taiwan, in the aftermath of the lifting of martial law in 1987, there was an emergence of organized labour protests and new and autonomous labour organizations, such as trade unions, labour parties and non-governmental organizations. Taiwan was a Newly Industrialised Country (NIC) ruled until 1987 by a single-party government (Kuomintang -the Nationalist Party) and characterized by Export-Oriented industrialization. The labour movement developed as part of a broader democratic movement which in 1986 had evolved into the foundation of an opposition political party (the Democratic Progressive Party - DPP). Starting from a critique of developmental state theory and from the concept of the state's political nature, the research aims at assessing the movement's major achievements and shortcomings through a perspective of social and political history based on the Gramscian categories of state, society, hegemony and subalterns. In particular, this paper argues that notwithstanding the achievements of an organizational autonomy from the oppressive social control of the Kuomintang party-state, the workers' movement encountered a major obstacle in the 'historical bloc' with specific ethnic and political characteristics based on the historical division between the People's Republic of China (mainland China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan). A further research hypothesis on the role of culture in the construction of capitalist relations is also put forward on the basis of Gramsci's interpretation of pre-modern social groups and ideologies. The paper argues that a direction along the lines of a comparative research between pre-modern and modern forms of belonging to social organizations could reveal more about the Taiwanese working-class and its relations with labour parties and trade unions