Leverage of the Weak: Labor and Environmental Movements in Taiwan and South Korea. By Hwa-Jen Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 225 pages.

In this well-researched book, Leverage of the Weak: Labor and Environmental Movements in Taiwan and South Korea, Hwa-Jen Liu sets out to explain how social movement sequences came about in Taiwan and South Korea (hereafter Korea) and why the two countries experienced reverse movement sequences despite acclaimed similarities in their postwar development experiences. Through systematic comparisons of four movements in both countries, Liu carries out the inquiry through three areas of empirical questions concerning who were the early risers (movement emergence), the impact of early risers on latecomer movements, and the movements’ life trajectories (p.39). Korea followed a conventional capitalist route, where the labor movement thrived in the wave of industrialization before the environmental movement. Taiwan’s experience, however, suggests an anomaly, where the environmental movement arose first and accompanied industrialization.