The Silence of Silicon Lambs: Speaking Out Health and Environmental Impacts Within Taiwan`s Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park

Abstract

The high technology emergence in the 1980s coupled with the economic boom of the 1990s, have led to the rapid rise of IT industries located on both sides of the Pacific Rim. In Taiwan, Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park (HSIP, the so-called "eastern silicon valley") provided entrepreneurs with the low cost physical infrastructure, equally low cost labor and poor environmental regulatory implementation that led to profitable production and world-wide marketing high-tech products. But while investors, managers and researchers who worked within HSIP profited from the enormous growth of the high-tech sector, members of their labor force and local residents suffered. This paper investigates how local residents and high-tech employees have suffered from the environmental impacts and health risks of the IT industry; how those related policies have failed to deal with the social and environmental consequences of the IT industry. It argues that the economic and the consequential political success of the HSIP has cultivated a unique "information technology dominance" climate that has overridden the environmental and health concern within Taiwanese society.