In the 70 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, China's organic silicon industry has also gone through 68 spring and autumn. At present, China's organic silicon production capacity has reached 3 million tons per year, ranking first in the world, and has repeatedly broken through foreign technology monopolies.


In the past 68 years, with the hard work of several generations, the silicone industry has become one of the few industries in the domestic chemical industry that has developed independently and relies on independent innovation, with independent intellectual property rights, both in technology and in scale. It has made remarkable achievements and has become an important force in the world's organic silicon industry.


China's silicone industry research and industrialization originated in the early 1950s. In 1951, the Beijing Chemical Industry Experiment of the Ministry of Heavy Industry, led by Yang Donglin, used the Grignard method to synthesize silicone monomers and prototype silicone resins, which pioneered China's organic silicon industry and applied research.


In 1957, Shenyang Research Institute of Chemical Industry built a silicone intermediate test workshop, and carried out a direct synthesis of a mixture of methylchlorosilane and Grignard to synthesize phenylchlorosilane, and produced a silicone polymer. In 1958, at the on-site meeting held by the State Science and Technology Commission and the Ministry of Chemical Industry at the time, a full set of technical materials and drawings of the workshop were provided to relevant units throughout the country for promotion. So far, China's organic silicon began the first round of industrialization. In the same year, Shanghai Resin Factory built a direct production method for the synthesis of methylchlorosilane, and successively produced silicone resin, silicone oil and silicone rubber products.


But until the end of the 1970s, China's organic silicon industry has been in its infancy. The production capacity of polymers is only tens of tons to 100 tons. Silicone products are expensive, mainly for military support or for special industries. The implementation of the reform and opening up policy has caused the world's manufacturing industry to transfer to China in a large amount, which has promoted the widespread application of silicone products in China and brought spring to the development of the organic silicon material industry.


In the 1980s, Jiangxi Xinghuo Chemical Plant, Shanghai Resin Plant, Jinan Petrochemical Plant No. 4, Silicone Silicone Plant, Zhejiang Kaihua Silicone Plant, Jihua Company Calcium Carbide and Sichuan Natural Gas successively built methyl monomer production. The total production capacity of the plant is about 12,000 tons/year. However, the supply of methyl monomers in China is still seriously insufficient.


In the past ten years, other industries have introduced technology to establish joint ventures or wholly foreign-owned enterprises; however, the silicone industry has almost no action. Foreign companies attempt to monopolize and manipulate China's silicone market. Not only do they not transfer methyl monomer production technology, nor do they build factories in China, and even there are few joint ventures in post-processing products. Under this circumstance, domestic enterprises have immersed themselves in research and made breakthroughs in technology. In 1998, the 10,000-ton methyl monomer production unit of the Blue Star igniting plant was in normal operation, and China's organic silicon industry has entered a stage of rapid development.


In the market economy environment, some methyl monomer production enterprises have withdrawn from the field due to backward technology or industrial restructuring; while key enterprises such as Xinghuo Chemical Plant, Xin'an Chemical Group Corporation and Jilin Petrochemical Company have accelerated their development, some silicones. Manufacturers of downstream products and companies in related industries are also involved in the construction of methyl monomer production units.


In the new century, the world's organosilicon monomer production is accelerating its transfer to China. In 2004, Dow Corning and the German Wacker Company established a joint venture in China to invest in a 190,000 t/y siloxane project in Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu; China Bluestar Group acquired the Rhodia Company's silicone business in 2006. It became the world's fourth largest silicone production company; in 2007, Zhejiang Xinan Group signed a joint venture agreement with Meitu High-tech Materials Group of the United States to jointly build a 100,000 tons/year organosilicon monomer project in Zhejiang Jiande. So far, four of the world's top five silicone monomer producers have achieved “Made in China”.


At the same time as the scale of production continues to expand, the level of organic silicon production technology in China has also increased significantly. In 2006, the actual annual production of hot vulcanized silicone rubber and room temperature vulcanized silicone rubber exceeded 100,000 tons respectively, completely breaking the situation that foreign products occupy most of the domestic market, and realized technology in high temperature glue and room temperature glue. The products are exported in large quantities. By the end of 2017, China's methyl monomer production capacity reached 2.7 million tons.


In pursuit of high-quality development, China's organic silicon industry has no new capacity to put into production in 2018. Existing enterprises have upgraded their production capacity to 3 million tons per year through technological transformation and bottlenecks, ranking first in the world. China has become a veritable A major producer of silicones.