In 2012, Formosa began construction of the Formosa Ha Tinh Steel plant in Central Vietnam. Initially, the facility was meant to be built next to the Yunlin County Complex, but concern over water pollution – especially threats to Taiwan’s white dolphin population (Winkler 2019) – pushed the project abroad. Only shortly after the steel plant began operating in 2016, the release of toxic chemicals polluted an estimated 150 miles of Vietnam’s coastline. The death of hundreds of tons of fish and job loss of an estimated 50,000 – 100,000 fisher people marked a turning point for Vietnamese environmental movements and politics (Jobin 2020). After several weeks of silence, Formosa took public responsibility for the disaster and paid $500 million in compensation to the government. However, anger over the magnitude of the disaster and unequal distribution of funds led to large scale protest movements across the country. The government responded with violent police interventions, imprisonment of protestors, and tight control over media reporting, casting activists as agents of outside forces (Ortmann 2021, 288). Social scientists Stephan Ortmann explains the severity of this response with the nationwide spread of protests, exacerbated by the protestors' use of decentralized social media and involvement by the Catholic church, as well as international attention, all of which posed serious challenges to the legitimacy of Vietnam’s government (Ortmann 2021, 300).
