In the 1960s, Kaohsiung became one of the most important places in Taiwan’s economic transformation. Two developments changed the city’s role in the island’s future. First, the government established the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone in Qianzhen in December 1966, creating what official Taiwanese sources describe as the world’s first export processing zone. Second, Kaohsiung’s harbor expanded into a major site for the dismantling of aging ships, feeding Taiwan’s hunger for steel, machinery, and industrial materials. Within two years of the zone’s opening, it already employed more than 20,000 workers, showing how quickly Kaohsiung was being remade into a manufacturing and trade gateway.

The export processing zone mattered because it turned Kaohsiung into a bridge between imported materials and export-driven manufacturing. Taiwan’s strategy was simple but powerful: attract foreign investment, streamline customs, lease industrial land, and use abundant labor to produce goods for global markets. The zone was not just a factory district. It was a free-trade-style industrial experiment designed to expand exports, introduce technology, and create employment. In many ways, it became one of the foundations of what later came to be called the Taiwan economic miracle.

At the same time, Kaohsiung’s port was developing a second identity: the end-of-life harbor for obsolete ships. Shipbreaking in Kaohsiung began after World War II with the salvage of damaged vessels left in Taiwanese ports, but the trade deepened in the early 1960s. A shipping history of the port notes that many World War II standard cargo ships were broken up in the early 1960s, and that 90% of vessels arriving for breaking in 1962 were imported ships of this type. In other words, Kaohsiung was not only breaking local wrecks. It was dismantling a global backlog of aging merchant vessels from the war era.

This is where the story connects to American ships. Many of the “World War II standard cargo ships” circulating globally in the early 1960s were U.S.-built Liberty, Victory, and tanker types that had outlived their economic usefulness. One U.S. National Park Service history of the former SS Scotts Bluff, for example, records that the vessel arrived in Kaohsiung in 1968 to be broken up, and notes that this fate was common for many T2 tankers, Liberty ships, and Victory ships. That example sits at the end of the decade, but it illustrates the broader pattern: Kaohsiung had become part of the afterlife of America’s wartime fleet.

The dismantling itself was brutal, manual, and fast. By 1973, an official Taiwan Review article described Kaohsiung’s shipbreaking industry as having risen to first place in the world since the mid-1960s. It reported that 220 vessels totaling 1.6 million tons had been broken up in 1972. Ships were cleaned first, stripped of movable equipment and flammable items, and then cut apart with torches. At the dock, sections were lifted away by cranes; at nearby yards, larger pieces were cut down further for Taiwan’s steel industry. A typical 5,000-ton ship could be dismantled in 25 to 30 days. The process was dangerous, dirty, and highly dependent on low-paid labor.

Male workers in the dismantling economy

The shipbreaking workforce was overwhelmingly male. A 2014 Taiwanese study of shipbreaking workers explicitly examined 4,155 male shipbreaking workers over a 24-year follow-up period, while a later matched-cohort study followed 4,427 shipbreaking workers and found elevated cancer risks associated with asbestos exposure. The way these cohorts were constructed tells us something important about labor organization in the yards: the most visible and insured occupations in ship dismantling were male-dominated. Torch cutting, lifting, hauling, and dismantling were treated socially and institutionally as men’s work.

Men in this sector also faced some of the most direct exposure to asbestos. Asbestos had long been used in shipbuilding because of its heat resistance, thermal insulation, and electrical insulation qualities. Taiwanese asbestos research notes that the mineral was widely used in shipbuilding, heat insulation, and related industries. In shipbreaking, this meant workers often encountered asbestos not as a packaged industrial product, but as aging lagging, insulation boards, pipe coverings, and engine-room materials being ripped out of older vessels. The cancer studies on Taiwanese shipbreaking workers found statistically significant elevations in overall cancer and in respiratory cancers among the highest asbestos-exposure groups.

Female workers and the insulation industry

Women stood at a different but equally important point in Taiwan’s industrial rise. In manufacturing more broadly, young women became a central labor force after the mid-1960s. One classic study on Taiwan’s industrial workforce reported that the number of women employed in manufacturing increased 3.2 times between 1965 and 1974, driven especially by export-oriented light industry. Kaohsiung’s export-processing economy depended heavily on this feminized labor force. Official and cultural commemorations in Kaohsiung still remember the twenty-five young women who drowned in 1973 while commuting to the export processing zone, a tragedy now memorialized as part of Taiwan’s labor history.

In the insulation industry specifically, the historical record is quieter but not absent. A nationwide Taiwan study of asbestos factories found significantly increased mesothelioma risks in asbestos cement, thermal insulation, and shipbuilding industries. Among the eight factories in which mesothelioma cases were identified, there were 17 male cases and 1 female case. The study added that the gender-specific results were similar in men, while an especially high estimated rate ratio was observed in an asbestos-cement factory where a female mesothelioma case was diagnosed. That is a small number, but it is historically important: it reminds us that women were not outside the asbestos economy. They were present in asbestos-related manufacturing, and the health consequences reached them too.

A second Taiwan cohort study strengthens that point. Looking across asbestos-exposed workers from 1950 to 2015, researchers found elevated gastric-cancer incidence in both men and women. The standardized incidence ratio was 1.05 for males and 1.10 for females compared with the general population. That does not mean women had the same jobs as men in the shipbreaking yards. It does mean that women in Taiwan’s asbestos-related industries, including insulation-linked sectors, carried measurable occupational risks of their own