Essay About Fireworks Industry And Low-Tech

The Firecrackers and Fireworks Industry in China
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The firecrackers and fireworks industry in China was dominated by small family-owned-and-operated
workshops. It was essentially a low-tech, highly labor-intensive industry. After 1949, government-run
factories replaced the family-owned workshops. The increased scale and government funds made possible
the automation of some processes. However, the key processes like installing powder, mixing color
ingredients, putting in fuses, were still manually done by skilled workers.
The factories themselves were made up of small workshops that stood away from each other, so that in
case of an accident the whole factory would not explode. For the same safety consideration, the workshops
were usually located near a water source and in sparsely populated rural areas, to reduce the noise and
explosion hazard.
After the reform towards a market economy started in 1979, most of the factories were broken up and
became family-run units of production again. It was hoped that this privatization might help to motivate
people to increase their productivity and raise output. However, this move also served to restrict further
technological innovations. There were hardly any research and development (R & D) facilities, nor human
and capital resources allocated to R & D in most fireworks companies. The few resources that were
available were all spent on product varieties. Even in Liuyang, out of the 400,000 or so people working in
the industry, very few were engineers with advanced professional training.
In response, the Hunan and other local governments began initiatives aimed at upgrading the traditional
fireworks industry. Substantial amounts of money were spent on R&D. The Liuyang Firecrackers and
Fireworks Authority reported that they had spent RMB 2,000 million in projects with the Beijing
University of Technology and the Nanjing University of Science. Among these initiatives were
environmentally friendly fireworks, which used cold flame fireworks technology.
The majority of the manufacturing workers were regular farmers who had learned how to make fireworks
just by watching and following their elders. They would come to work in fireworks workshops