In 1986 Formosa Plastics put forward its sixth naphtha cracker and chose a site at the Lize industrial zone in Yilan. For a county living off farming and fishing, whose young people drained steadily towards Taipei, this was the largest single investment offered in decades.
Chen Ding-nan, the county magistrate, opposed it. His grounds were not a general appeal to the environment. Yilan has mountains on three sides and the sea on the fourth, the north-east monsoon holds the winter air down over the Lanyang plain so that it does not disperse, and the county's water sources and paddy lie downwind. He asked Formosa Plastics for figures on what the plant would emit. Formosa Plastics considered the demand obstructive.
In June 1987 Chen and Wang Yung-ching argued it out on television. What made the debate memorable was not that either won — neither side was talked round — but that it put a county magistrate and an industrialist in the same frame, with no central government in the picture. Before that, such a matter would not have been argued on television, and would not have been blocked by a magistrate.
The cracker did not go away.
Martial law was lifted that July. The relations between local and central government, and between residents and a development, loosened very fast on either side of that date, and the Yilan case sat exactly on the hinge. Under martial law a magistrate could not have stopped an investment approved by the ministry of economic affairs. After it, he could.
In 1988 Formosa Plastics gave up on Yilan.
Yilan then took a different road: dredging and reclaiming the Dongshan river, a waterfront park, an international children's festival, a coastline left to set-net fisheries and dunes, and no large industrial zone. That road brings in less than a petrochemical complex would. County finances have been tight for years and the young still leave for Taipei, though the commute got shorter once the Hsuehshan tunnel opened.
The cracker did not go away. It moved south, and in 1991 it came to rest on the shore at Mailiao in Yunlin. What Yilan turned back was not stopped; it was passed to another county to carry, and that county's finances were tighter than Yilan's. Nobody raised that during the debate, because at the time nobody knew where the next stop would be.
His method had one distinguishing feature: he did not argue positions, he argued numbers. How much would be emitted, which way does the wind sit, where are the water sources, is the paddy upwind or down, and how long would an evacuation take if something went wrong. Almost nobody in the Taiwanese administrative system had asked such questions, because approval of an investment lay with the centre and the locality's job was to accommodate it.
He was called Magistrate Blue Sky, and what most people remember is that he took no gifts and kept out of the banqueting. What actually changed things was that he redefined an industrial investment from something the centre approves and the locality carries out into something the locality must first be able to read before its consent is even at issue. That redefinition mattered more than the cracker did. It was picked up afterwards by Gongliao, by Houjin, by Meinong, by every place with a development on its hands.
Chen Ding-nan, elected Yilan county magistrate in 1981 and re-elected once. Formosa Plastics' sixth cracker was turned away on his watch.
Legislative Yuan, Republic of China
Wang Yung-ching in 1966. Twenty years later he proposed the sixth naphtha cracker at Lize in Yilan, and in June 1987 debated Chen Ding-nan on television.
Central News Agency
The sign at the entrance to Lize Industrial Park. The Industrial Development Bureau zoned the land in 1980, and Formosa Plastics bought more than 200 hectares east of the highway for the cracker. When the plant was never built, the bureau bought the land back and re-parcelled it for smaller firms.
Chuang Wen-sheng, Chung Pi-chuan, Hsieh Shu-chuan / Yilan County Cultural Affairs Bureau, Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank, CC BY 3.0 TW
President Lee Teng-hui inspects the Dongshan River works in Yilan, 8 December 1990. Without the cracker, the county put its money into the river and a waterside park.
Office of the President, Republic of China