ABSTRACT
Compared with the neoliberal regimes of Western society, in East Asia, faced with the liberalism of integrated markets and the authoritative expert politics of developmental states, the challenge for environmental justice is even greater. The opposition between authoritative politics and democratic governance is embedded in the social and political contexts of the regions. During the early modernization process in the 1970s, South Korea experienced authoritative bureaucracy (Han and Shim 2010). Despite Japan’s defeat in World War II, the nation’s militarism laid the foundation for an authoritative culture. In Taiwan, the KMT regime continued to fiercely suppress the rise of an opposition movement until the early 1980s. Under this regime, the developmental state was ruled with a mixture of bureaucracy and technological elitism. Technocrats guided national economic and technological development, forming the foundation of authoritative expert politics. With the political democratization of the 1980s, the political power consortia (chaebols, or big enterprise) in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan gradually penetrated government, which weakened the power of the developmental state. The technocrats lost their autonomy in the decision-making process (Castells 1992; Weiss 1998), and were replaced by a regime of loosened control-oriented neoliberalism to further prioritize economic development (Kim 2007; Chu 2011; Shin 2012). Since China’s economic reform of 1979 introduced capitalism, opened China to the rest of the world and modernized the nation, the policy of ‘growth at any cost’ has led to social unrest, a growing disparity between social classes, and environmental catastrophe (Joines 2012).
