The Ground Made at Mailiao
The plant Yilan refused came to rest at Mailiao in Yunlin in 1991. There are no mountains here to hold the air down, there was a long stretch of tidal flat that could be filled, and both the county and the township agreed.
The reclamation came before the plant. Work began in July 1994 — sand pumped from offshore, embankments, drainage, compaction — and produced in the end over two thousand six hundred hectares, many times the size of the existing township. The ground is new on the map, is zoned industrial in the land register, and used to appear on the tide tables as oyster beds and sandbars.
The first phase came on stream in 1998. Total investment ran past six hundred billion Taiwan dollars, the largest single private investment the country has seen. The shortfall in domestic ethylene was closed and the downstream plastics and textile trades no longer depended entirely on imported feedstock. That was the reason the sixth cracker had been planned for, and it did what it was planned to do.
Mailiao township has a population of a little over twenty thousand. At the peak, the plant's employees and its contracto…
Mailiao township has a population of a little over twenty thousand. At the peak, the plant's employees and its contractors together outnumbered the township. Revenue, compensation payments, employment and access roads arrived at once, houses went up, and the young no longer had to go to Taipei.
The price was written from the start on the other side of the same sheet. In 2010 and again in 2011 came industrial accidents and fires, and the smoke drifted off the shore into the fields. The arguments over air quality, over losses to farming and fishing, and over the health of residents have not stopped since. A research team from the college of public health at National Taiwan University has run long-term follow-up in the neighbouring townships, and the county government and the company have been through several rounds of litigation and administrative penalties.
What makes this hard to discuss is that neither side's account is a lie. Mailiao really is richer than the townships around it, and people really have moved away. Within one township, the households that live off the plant and the households that farm are on the same street.
After the Yilan debate, Taiwan learned that a locality can say no. Mailiao supplies the second half of the sentence: the right to say no is not evenly distributed. Yilan had mountains, tourism, and a magistrate the whole country was watching. Yunlin had a stretch of sea that could be filled.
Oysters are grown on stakes in the tidal flats. You do not buy land for it, you only need that stretch of sand to be covered and uncovered by the tide once a day. A grandson still sets his stakes where his grandfather set them. The reclamation turned the flats into land. Compensation was reckoned by area, but oyster ground carries no deed — it is nobody's land, it is everyone's sea. So some were paid and some were not, and the basis of the reckoning was registration, and registration had never covered a thing of that kind. Inshore catches fell afterwards too, for reasons that cannot be pinned down: possibly the reclamation altered the currents, possibly the discharges, possibly the whole strait has gone the same way over these decades. What cannot be pinned down cannot be claimed for. That is the commonest shape these disputes take — the harm is diffuse and the evidence is concentrated, and the side holding the evidence has lawyers.
Isle of Time