Democratization in East Asia in the late 1980s: Taiwan breakthrough, Hong Kong frustration

Abstract

Political history took an unexpected turn in East Asia in the late 1980s. The booming movement in Hong Kong had gone downhill and suffered defeat, while the authoritarian Taiwan state actively sponsored genuine democratic reforms. What then explains the Taiwan democratic breakthrough and the Hong Kong democratic frustration? This article argues that conventional explanations offered in the modernization, the dependency, and the class literature—such as culture, liberal colonialism, wealth, new middle class, bureaucratic-authoritarian state, crises, and absence of conservative class coalition—are unable to account for the divergent paths of democratic development in Taiwan and Hong Kong. As an alternative, this article presents a model that highlights the importance of conjuncture factors. It is argued that since Taiwan and Hong Kong have shared similar structural conditions, researchers have to bring in conjuncture factors such as the historical event of Chinese unification, the capacity of the political agency to promote democratic reforms, and the strategy of protest in order to explain the Taiwan breakthrough and the Hong Kong frustration.