Ba jing you Taiwan: Guoguang shihua de gushi 八輕遊台灣：國光石 化的故事 [The Naphtha Cracker That Travels around Taiwan: The Story of Koukuang Petrochemical Project] by Shieh Jyh-Cherng 謝志誠 and Ho Ming-sho 何明修 (review)

On Earth Day 2011, Taiwan's president, Ma Ying-jeou, held a press conference. He stated that the Chinese Petroleum Corporation of Taiwan, the state-owned enterprise that holds a majority stake in Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology, would withdraw its support of Kuokuang's plan to build a petrochemical industrial zone that was to include the island's eighth naphtha cracker in Changhua County's Tacheng Wetlands. The announcement marked the victory of a campaign environmentalists had led against the project. Two months later, a social scientist and an engineering scholar completed Ba jing you Taiwan: Guoguang shihua de gushi. Shieh Jyh-Cherng is a scientist in bioindustrial engineering who had been active in the successful movement in the 1990s to halt development of the Binnan Industrial Zone (which was to include the island's seventh naphtha cracker), and Ho Ming-sho is a sociologist who has established his reputation with studies of environmental politics and social movements. Based on archival documents, newspaper articles, and interviews (most of these conducted with activists), the book is written in the style of a historical story, with the authors' views present only between the lines. It traces the changes in the proposed site of Taiwan's eighth naphtha cracker, which was renamed Kuokuang Petrochemical in 2005. Through a historical review, the authors describe how the state-led plan for this development was shaped by political, economic, and social forces over two decades. This book is a must-read for those who are interested in development studies, the environmental movement, and politics in Taiwan.

The book starts with a brief historical review of Taiwan's naphtha crackers, assigned ordinal numbers by the government since the 1960s. Under what the authors call "developmentalist authoritarianism" (kaifa ducai 開發獨裁), naphtha-cracking plants 1-4 advanced thanks to edicts from the central government; local governments and the public played no part in the decision-making process. However, as the book shows, the authoritarian regime found it difficult to proceed in this fashion after the late 1980s because of political democratization, environmentalism, and economic liberalization. The expansion of the petrochemical industry, including plans for naptha-cracking plants 5-8, has gradually encountered various objections from local residents, environmental activists, and local politicians, including in some cases even the local government as a whole. Plans to build naphtha-cracking plant 5 were delayed for three years in the late 1980s because of strong resistance from residents of the Huogin area of Kaohsiung City. Plant 6, a private project, was built in Yunlin County after plans to build it in Ilan County and Taoyuan County were abandoned thanks to strong local objections. As to the seventh plant, after an eleven-year-long campaign, it failed to receive approval from the regional planning committee. As the autonomy of the developmental state weakened, the dynamism of local politics, the environmental movement, and the significance of private capital increased. Like previous plans, those for naphtha-cracking plant 8 encountered strong resistance, and the project had to "travel" for eighteen years before its supporters began to think about taking the project abroad.

The book is divided into six parts discussing the changes of proposed sites in different counties, covering the period from 1994 to 2011. Plans for plant 8 were initiated by Taiwan's economic minister in 1988 when proposals for the fifth and sixth encountered strong local resistance. However, no site was selected until 1994, when the Chinese Petroleum Corporation signed an agreement with eighteen privately owned chemical enterprises. Since then, plans have been drawn up to locate the naphtha cracker in six different cities in central and southern Taiwan, as a series of complex political struggles have been waged.

Retrospectively, it feels like the central government did not select a proper location...