The Hottest Soap Opera In Taipei

It's a drama worthy of prime-time TV. Last year, Y.C. Wang, the patriarchal founder of Formosa Plastics Group, Taiwan's biggest company, banished his son Winston from the family firm for a year as punishment for an extramarital affair. Now the time is up, and Wang has announced his son will not return because he hasn't mended his ways.

A company aide says no one in the family wants to talk about this private matter, but that isn't keeping all Taiwan from obsessing over the island's own version of Dallas. Winston, 45, managed the electronics division at Nan Ya Plastics Corp., the largest of the companies that make up the group, which has sales of $6.2 billion. Considered the most capable member of the family's second generation, Winston was expected eventually to succeed his 79-year-old father as chairman. Instead, the group appears headed for a period in which the remaining siblings and one of the elder Wang's three wives, Li Pao-chu, vie with one another and with a stable core of professional managers for control. "It's likely to be a big succession fight, and that could be destabilizing to the company in the short term," says K.C. Kao, a plastics-industry analyst at ING Barings Ltd.