Contentious Politics in Two Villages: Comparative Analysis of Anti-High-Speed-Rail Campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan

The central thesis of this study is derived from a pair of seemingly anomalous cases of anti-high-speed-rail campaigns from Hong Kong and Taiwan respectively. While the unprecedentedly high degree of public participation in the Anti-Express Rail Link movement in the early 2010 stands in stark contrast with the previous social movements in Hong Kong, the conspicuous absence in Taiwan of an organized oppositional force against the High Speed Rail development in the late 1990s also sets itself apart from other similar local contentious responses. By probing into the contrasting and distinctive cases of the high speed rail controversies in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the cases of Choi Yuen Village and Liujia Village in particular, this study highlights the salient role of the political opportunity structure in determining the forms of political interaction with the state -- namely, transgressive contention and contained contention. This thesis argues that the likelihood for a social movement to employ an extra-institutional form of political action varies with the openness of the political opportunity structure in a curvilinear fashion. Three analytically distinctive dimensions (formal, informal, and perceived aspects) of the political opportunity structure are specified in this study: accessibility to the institutionalized political system, stability of elite alignments, and the state's response to social movements. Through tracing the changes in the above three dimensions over time, this study reveals that the trajectory of change in the openness of the political opportunity structure determines the outcome of contentious politics. Contrary to the depiction by the "expanding opportunity" literature, this study finds that while a constricting political opportunity structure encourages the emergence of transgressive contention, a further expanding of the political opportunity structure will indeed give rise to contained contention. Finally, this study also pinpoints the importance of organizational dynamics in determining the intensity of mobilization.