Introduction: Science, Law, and Industrial Toxic Exposure

This special issue was first conceived with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) campaign in Taiwan as its main inspiration. Starting in 1998 and still ongoing, the struggle of former employees of the RCA seeking justice for toxic exposure they were subjected to when the company operated in Taiwan between 1968 and 1992 is by now one of the longest social-movement campaigns, and certainly the longest and largest lawsuit in history. Hundreds of volunteers have worked together with the victims to contribute to the campaign over the decades, bringing expertise in law, public health, STS, organizing, filmmaking, and other fields, to not only sustain the campaign and lawsuit but also to widen its influence on and inspiration of various scholarly fields such as public health and STS (Chen 2011). Throughout its long struggle, the RCA campaign has found sister campaigns and allies in many other countries, and STSers working with the campaign have found mutually inspiring colleagues. Hence the idea for an EASTS special issue connecting these experiences and analyses.

When people organize collective responses to industrial toxic exposure that is damaging to the human body and the environment, the struggle often proceeds via the entangled institutional knowledge-making (or lack thereof) in science and law—the two institutionalized epistemic authorities in modern society. Although similar struggles have been going on since late eighteenth-century England, wherever and whenever industrialization is to be found, those situated in or with close connections to industries in East Asia deserve special attention. The articles and field report in this special issue, together with Kim et al.’s 2020 EASTS article on the Samsung Leukemia case in South Korea, attempt to explore various facets through cases that have transcended time and space—often on multiple scales. (Kim et al. 2020).

What is so special about East Asian industries? In 2023, they have become a staple topic in the business media as both the United States and European Union welcome new manufacturing investments from Taiwan and South Korea, especially those in microchips and electric vehicles, as a counterweight to the clout of China, the workshop of the world for the past three decades, in the heightened geopolitical tensions after the outbreak of war on Ukraine. Such industrial investment, however, is neither new nor one-sided. Adams, Schütz, and Fortun deal with a petrochemical complex built and operated since 1989 by a Taiwanese conglomerate in Calhoun County, Texas (Adams, Schütz and Fortun 2023). Paul Jobin’s article and Hsin-Hsing Chen’s field report examine the struggle with the toxic legacy of a US-owned electronics plant operated in Taiwan between 1968 and 1992 (Jobin 2023; Chen 2023). The “knowledge gridlock” examined by Wen-Ling Tu, together with that explored by Kim, Kim, and Lim (2020), involve high-tech manufacturing operated by local corporations in Taiwan and South Korea but serving wider transnational supply chains of electronic products sold on today’s global market (Tu 2023).

What may be genuinely distinctive are the legal and institutional frameworks wherein the cases examined in this special issue are fought, and sometimes the struggles which have helped to change these frameworks. Both South Korea and Taiwan were governed by pro-business, authoritarian states some three decades ago. Struggles over the scientific and legal aspects of industrial toxic exposure were, therefore, simultaneously struggles for democracy—attempts to push democratization beyond the simple definition of free and fair elections. This was also the case for similar struggles in postwar Japan, as Timothy George pointed out in his Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (George, S. Timothy 2001). The cases fought in Japan a generation earlier provided crucial inspiration and precedent for Taiwan and South Korea. This, however, should not be read as a “flying geese paradigm” of ever-advancing democratization.¹ When we bring Calhoun County into focus, the picture becomes muddled with the complexities of time: new and old, early and late, advanced and backward, and so on.

The overall picture of people struggling against industrial toxic exposure explored in this special issue does not fit well with a conventional narrative of modernization theory, which ranks entire nation-states, including their science and technology, market economy, democratic politics, rule of law, public administration, assorted human beliefs and behaviors, and so on, from backward to advanced or from periphery to center along a unidirectional line of progress. STS scholarship has by now grown accustomed to challenging such a simplified belief in linear progress—witness the critique of the “latecomers thesis” rife in East Asian studies on technology and society by Lin and Law (2015) and Dung-Sheng Chen (2015)—and has come up with alternative approaches. This special issue takes that challenge even further.

What is important about “late” in the context of “late industrialism,” especially that described in Fortun (2014), lies not really in its contrast to an “early” stage. What Fortun describes as features of late industrialism—“[d]eteriorating industrial infrastructure, landscapes dotted with toxic waste ponds, climate instability, incredible imbrication of commercial interest in knowledge production, in legal decisions, in governance at all scales” (310)—may conjure up nostalgia about earlier times, when industrial infrastructure was brand new and probably built among farms or fishing villages in a predominantly rural country. Yet this is exactly what happened with RCA in Taoyuan, Taiwan; with the Samsung Semiconductor plant in Giheung, South Korea; with the high-tech plants discharging “invisible” pollution into the Keya and Siaoli Rivers in Hsinchu, Taiwan; and in Calhoun County, Texas, where fisherfolk have been fighting pollution of all kinds from the Formosa Plastics plant for over three decades now. In all these cases, there has never been an untainted, idyllic past to go back to. Looking back years or even decades later, after companies who poisoned bodies and environments have finally been held accountable in one way or another, people invariably find that such injustices had been in the making since the very first spade had broken ground on a new investment project.

But in addition to “old and dilapidated,” “late” can also mean “mature and sophisticated.” In this regard, the science and law, along with regulatory agencies relying on science and law to function, seem hopelessly “early,” i.e. underdeveloped to meet their stated goals, compared to “late” industries. Some of these shortfalls in protections for life and the environment exist by design. The “trade secret” enshrined in international treaties and national laws since the 1995 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is one such design. Although not originally intended to shield manufacturers from liabilities arising from toxic exposure, “trade secret” laws have effectively allowed manufacturers to claim vital information such as lists of chemicals as proprietary knowledge and to withhold this from governments, researchers, and the wider public. This has kept knowledge production in regulatory science on high-tech industry always several steps behind the constant innovations (and novel chemicals of little-known health effects) introduced into production lines. This knowledge gap has kept workers’ organizations and environmental groups at a disadvantage when they seek to redress these problems. The lopsided struggle between a company’s hired science, a government’s official science, and the bottom-up science of victims’ advocates in the Samsung Leukemia campaign is one glaring example. So are the woefully inadequate regulatory actions both in Taiwan and in Texas against pollution by powerful corporations. In the RCA case, the company simply claimed that all operational data had been destroyed, and it took researchers years to piece together what had likely been happening on the shop floor from whatever evidence remained. (Lin Yi-Ping 2018).

Other disadvantages facing victims of industrial toxic exposure have to do with the constraints of the legal traditions that define what a court of law can do. Toxic tort, for example, is a major form of legal action used by victims of toxic exposure to seek justice through civil lawsuits (Cranor 2006). If a victim prevails in court, or settles on favorable terms, they receive monetary compensation. While the traditional concept of compensation for civil damage is to “restore status quo ante,” this is all but impossible in today’s cases of industrial toxic exposure. What, then, does the money mean for the victims? Does it mean an apology from the perpetrator and moral punishment for their infringements? Does it prevent companies from committing similar gross negligence in the future? Does it force people to put a monetary value on damaged health or on the genetic disorders faced by future generations? Paul Jobin’s work explores the complex meaning of “pricing their lives” for the Taiwan RCA workers, after the first cohort received compensation. And such a conundrum exists in all cases, when monetary compensation is the only form afforded by the legal system to the harmed party.

On this point, the recent developments in Calhoun County, Texas, presented by Adams, Schütz, and Fortun provide an example that is both encouraging and sobering. While intrepid grassroots environmentalists such as Diane Wilson have already won international attention and have since the early 1990s been building a coalition with fellow environmentalists in Taiwan in their struggle with Formosa Plastics, this long and tortuous “labor of law” resulted in a groundbreaking 2019 settlement between the community and the company. Rather than awarding a certain amount of monetary compensation for environmental and health damage, the consent decree between Formosa Plastics and the San Antonio Bat Waterkeepers, a civic organization, has empowered local fisherfolk to monitor plastic pellets discharged by Formosa into the water, and to impose a fine for each infringement. The fines contribute to a public fund for local environmental and social research and development. Thus, rather than reaching for an improbable endpoint of some sort in a decades-long controversy, this “open-ended program” is “serving less as guarantees than as openings to new terrains of political struggle” (Adams, Schütz, and Fortun 2023: 481). Similar arguments can be said about the cases of RCA, Samsung, and high-tech water pollution in Hsinchu: changes in science and law, and the increase in people’s active engagement with both, are more valuable than an actual amount of monetary compensation or fines.

In this sense, particularly given that Texas state environmental authorities have long been ineffective, the struggles in Calhoun County share similar characteristics to those in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and can be seen as part of a struggle for democracy. Despite the historical claim of the United States to be one of the oldest democracies in the world, and the fact that the US played an instrumental role in democratization in East Asian countries such as postwar Japan, people in Calhoun County needed to rebuild a public apparatus to safeguard their lives and livelihoods outside an existing state apparatus that had repeatedly failed them.

Science and law are two institutionalized epistemic authorities which are expected to operate independently of all other authorities and to produce knowledge solely on the merit of evidence and rules. Although interlinked in numerous ways, science and law are still two distinct institutions. The law is explicitly incorporated into typical modern state structures, embodied as the legislative and judicial branches of governments, and as the normative principle of the rule of law. Legal discourse tends to be highly normative and prescriptive; it is often considered a proper forum for debating on moral, social, or political value judgements. Science, by comparison, interacts with state and society in much more subtle and versatile ways. Scientific discourse is typically descriptive and analytical and adoptive of a “value-free” stance. Socio-technical actions based on scientifically produced facts are seen as being taken through political processes outside of the scientific community. How to make visible the implicit epistemic authority of science over modern society and hence how to make possible an analysis of science intertwined with other social domains have been central tasks of STS since its inception.

The collective actions presented in this special issue strive to continue this drive for democratization at a point where science and law cross paths. But, just as with the democratization of a state, such a transformation is never a one-off affair in which an old, degenerate regime is overthrown, a new and better form of government is built, and everyone can go back to business. Instead, new and better science and law have to be built on the foundation of the existing ones, with active participation from more and more people. For this necessarily long and winding endeavor, the collective initiatives in the cases examined in this special issue will provide food for thought on the way.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hsin-Hsing Chen

Hsin-Hsing Chen is a professor at the Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies, Shih-Hsin University. He has been involved in the Taiwan RCA workers'campaign since the late 1990s, and has been a member of the workers' advisory group since 2009.

Notes

1 The “flying geese paradigm” (雁行形態論, Gankō keitai-ron) was made popular by Japanese developmental economist Kaname Akamatsu (赤松要) in the 1960s to describe the phenomena typified by economic development and industrialization among East Asian Countries: Japan led the flying geese formation, followed by the “four dragons” of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which were, in turn, followed by the ASEAN countries and China.