Taiwan Church News

3258 Edition

August 4 - August 10, 2014

Editorial

Let Us Wake Up From The Myth Of Economic Development After Kaohsiung Big Blast

The devastating chemical propene big blast, due to a serious leakage, in the deep night on July 31 at Kaohsiung city of Southern Taiwan, took away 30 precious lives and injured about 300 people with incalculable household destruction and damages. Such unprecedented ever industrial accident, happened within an internationally famous harbor-city, pointed to the tragic development of Taiwan's petroleum chemical industry under the hegemonic slogan of economic development.

WhenChinese Petroleum Corp.(CPC) established The First Naphata Cracking Plant in 1968, Kaohsiung accepted her historic but tragic role as a factory city of petrochemical industry as one of the Ten Major Infrastructure Projects. Up to now, Kaohsiung supplies about 70% of material products for Taiwan's petro-chemical industry and creates over 300 thousands jobs for this city's residents. Yet, over NTD 100 billions (97%) of the industry's business tax or sales revenues has to be consecrated to Taipei city, as most HQ offices of those major petro-chemical corps are located there; Kaohsiung could only own very limited resources and about 3 billions tax income (3%) from these petro-chemical industry.

In other words, except the apparent jobs vacant supplied by the petroleum industry, most risks and dangers among petro-chemical production are all transferred to Kaohsiung. So, the residents of Kaohsiung not only have to bear the risks of the rampant industrial chemical pipelines running under city, but also those of air-pollution among fuel consumption and those of poisonous waste. Not just people will have cancers from these pollution, a lot of environmental disasters will show up around the corner including green house effects, sour rain, water pollution, marine ecological holocaust and etc.

Because of the dense population on this space-limited island, Taiwan tragically chose to possess the petro-chemical industry under the slogan of economical development. And now, due to our overlook and mis-management to maintain the underground pipeline systematically, this devastating big blast holocaust is finally culminated in our never satisfied pursuit and covet for material goods in the name of economic development.

No matter what kinds of disasters lying ahead of us, be it petro-chemical or even nuclear, may God lead us to wake up from the hegemonic myth of economical development. Let us not just take serious the bitter fruits resulted by economical injustice, but also be willing to practice the true economics in Christian faith - throwing off "dishonest scales" and "false weights" to care for the aged, the oppressed, the women and the children!