ABSTRACT
The United States would have to establish alliances with the pre-war anticommunist political elites across the region in order to counter the threat posed by labour and other social forces seeking a more egalitarian post-war social order. If the United States wished to maintain its economic and political world supremacy, it needed to construct an open multilateral global trading system and revive the productive capacities of the key capitalist economies. Korea's nominally more liberal labour laws notwithstanding, neither Korea nor Taiwan was subject to any initial New Deal-type 'democratic experiment' as seen in Japan, and post-war labour policy was of an immediately more repressive nature in both countries. The Korean economy suffered from severe unemployment and underemployment; thus, workers were more concerned with gaining any employment opportunity than with achieving wage gains or more favourable working conditions. Taiwanese catch-up industrialisation by facilitating a process of passive revolution.
