ABSTRACT
Corporatism is usually depicted as counterpoised to democratic pluralism and free-market forces. The East Asian model of corporatism borrowed heavily from Japan's experience earlier this century, when the Japanese state had begun erecting corporatist structures to control and coopt the lower classes, to prevent them from becoming autonomously organized. In Taiwan, the Kuomintang government, following the Japanese example, in the early 1950s enforced corporatist hierarchies upon the Taiwanese populace both as a political and an economic control measure. Even before the advent of Deng and the reform era, China already possessed corporatist structures. The chapter analyzes the important trends at three different levels of organization: corporatist mechanisms organized at a national level — that is, peak corporatism; corporatism that centers on the regional/local level; and the efforts to shape a form of micro-corporatism within some of the state-run enterprises.
