Southern Green Revolution: Urban Environmental Activism in Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Abstract

While the environmental movement in southern Taiwan exemplifies the recent worldwide trend of social movements with participants seeking local identity and autonomy in an increasingly global but deterritorialized world, it also has distinctive local characteristics derived from Taiwan's unique geo‐political history. In Taiwan, environmental movements were an integral part of the larger process of democratization. In their effort to create a cleaner and greener environment, green activists in Kaohsiung, the second largest city in Taiwan, set up examples of citizen participation and assisted in establishing within the existing administrative framework formal mechanisms for public involvement. More crucially, via the language of ecological conservation, they helped to create a powerful political discourse that not only fundamentally challenged the central government's legitimacy, but also forced the country to rethink and refashion the foundation of Taiwan's national identity that, in turn, aided the efforts of environmental preservation.