Wesleyan University’s Ying Jia Tan, an associate professor of history, gave a talk at the University of Connecticut’s Wood Hall about the Taiwanese plastic industry in support of his upcoming book for the East Asian Workshop lecture series on Friday, Oct. 3.
UConn history professor Victor Zatsepine gave a short introduction on Tan. Tan received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University and has an interest in the history of science and technology. His primary interests are East Asian history and Chinese maritime history. Zatsepine also said that the East Asian Workshop happens twice a semester.
Tan began the talk by talking about the Chang Chun Group, which has no relation to Changchun, China. Chang Chun Group once known as a plywood adhesive producer. Tan asked the audience, “How did this company start with this [and] grow into the second largest petrochemical corporation in Taiwan?”
Tan’s working title for his upcoming book is “Catalogue of Dreams: Plastic and the Economic Transformation of Chinese East Asia.” The chapters of the book are named after specific “dreams,” for example, “Dreams of Eternal Spring.” He said, “I’m looking into the dreams of these companies.”
Tan acknowledged the large presence of plastic in Taiwan. The culmination of this could be found in how a chain of hospitals and universities were owned by petrol companies. Tan also noted the “transformation from an organic economy to a carbon economy” marked in 1968 with the opening of the first plastic factory.
Tan said that plastics are not a “cardinal evil,” noting, “it is possible to make a sort of carbon-neutral plastic.” He also made the audience aware of carbon that could trap carbon dioxide and transform the gas into acetic acid. However, Tan noted that some companies claim that they’re environmentally friendly as a marketing strategy despite the harm they cause to the environment.
The talk was split into three parts: the making of phenolic resins or Bakelite on the ruins of Japanese imperialism, the thermosetting plastic plywood adhesive urea formaldehyde and the growth of Taiwan’s chemical industry, along with polyvinyl alcohol and methanol facilitating Chang Chun’s transformation into a diversified petrochemical industry.
Tan began with a brief historical background on Taiwan around the time of the plastic industry there. In 1945, Taiwan was controlled by China after Japan’s colonization of the island. Later on, the United States offered agricultural and industrial aid to Taiwan, which helped the plastic industry there become what it is now. Before plastic, Taiwan’s main three exports were sugar, tea and camphor. Tan also noted that the plastic industry helped the agricultural industry as well.
Eventually, the plastic factories needed a replacement for the original plastics they were producing. This was how they started producing Bakelite.
The Taiwanese Liao Mingkun, Cheng Hsin-I and Lin Shu-hon were the founders of Chang Chun and they worked on Japanese machines making Bakelite at the Forestry Research Institute. Tan called it a “very typical Taiwanese story.” He also noted that in chemistry practices, it was possible to buy materials from stores at the time. It proved extremely profitable and an easy process to make Bakelite.
The plastic industry profited from the Korean War since, according to Tan, “Phenol is used to make gunpowder” and was sold in the black market as a result.
The plastic urea formaldehyde, which eventually turns soft and flimsy was sold at $1000 USD per ton and was restricted from trade so Chang Chun moved to plywood adhesives using plywood from the Philippines. “All they had was a stopwatch and a pipette,” Tan said.
Later on, Tan said, “Japanese supplier Toyo Koatsu offer[ed] to export technology for formaldehyde production to Chang Chun Synthetic Resin Factory.” This sidestepped the trade restrictions on formaldehyde. Chang Chun also observed what the Japanese companies were doing.
“I teach a course in Taiwan, and what I want to get out of it is that Taiwan has a complex history,” Tan said. “This is a story of reverse integration.”
In the Q&A, Tan said about his book, “What I’m dealing with is that this is a really difficult chapter to write because I have to scrape [information] from the government.” Tan only has a few documents to work with.
An attendee asked Tan about how these chemical engineers were able to read the economic conditions and pivot into different products to sell and become successful. Tan said, “They are very privileged, they all have degrees in chemical engineering.” Tan also said that the engineers had been educated in Japanese-occupied Taipei, Taiwan, so the majority of their classmates were Japanese as a result.
Zatsepine ended the official talk by saying, “I think your work is an example [of] how sciences and humanities should talk together and communicate.” He then made the audience aware of the next East Asian Workshop on Nov. 14 with professor of history Peter Zarrow on museums in Taiwan.
When asked about his thoughts on the talk, Douglas Temple, a seventh-semester economics major said, “It was excellent. I think that Prof. Tan is an old school polymath [in] history, chemistry and economics. I think it’s incredibly impressive in this day and age with niche understanding of such knowledge across a broad field is impressive.”