The Firecrackers and Fireworks Industry in China

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