Planning the Chungju Fertilizer Plant: Development Cooperation and Cold War Engineering Networks Across the US and East Asia

Was South Korea’s development in the 1950s solely an outcome of the country’s cooperation with the UN and the US? This presentation examines the planning process of South Korea’s Chungju Fertilizer Plant to uncover the hidden networks that shaped South Korea’s development during the Cold War. The Chungju Fertilizer Plant, South Korea’s first large-scale nitrogen fertilizer plant, started operating in 1961. It was a notable accomplishment not only for South Korea but also for the UN and the US government. The United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) conducted a major preliminary engineering survey for the plant, while the US Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) funded the construction. These government-level collaborations make it appear as if the construction of the Chungju Fertilizer Plant was yet another outcome of UN-Korea or US-Korea cooperation. However, this presentation reveals that the planning of the Chungju Fertilizer Plant was deeply tied to concurrent fertilizer plant constructions in Taiwan. Since there was no official cooperation project between South Korea and Taiwan, this connection only becomes visible by shifting focus from government-led development initiatives to engineering companies that carried their expertise across several countries simultaneously. By showing the complex interplay of transnational private-public relationships in development cooperation, this presentation argues that the industrialization of South Korea was the result of inter-Asia connections shaped by the US’s Cold War strategy in East Asia during the 1950s.