Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)

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Opened by Chinese merchants at the start of the last century, Fushun’s coal mines were occupied by Japan during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and placed under Mantetsu’s management soon after. Following the fall of Japan’s empire in 1945, the Fushun colliery was seized first by the Soviets, then the Chinese Nationalists, and finally the Chinese Communists, under whose control it has since remained as a state-owned enter-prise. Throughout, operators maximized their hauls by deploying various technologies of extraction. They turned not only to methods like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage to more completely extract carbon energy from the earth but also to mechanisms like fingerprinting and calorie counting to do the same with human labor. Fushun was the model of modern coal mining in China and Japan, and images of its immense open pit fed fantasies of energy-intensive industrial modernity in Tokyo, Nanjing, Beijing, and beyond. Victor Seow (VS): As with many other scholars and their first projects, I took a somewhat long and winding path to Fushun and coal mining. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun's purportedly "inexhaustible" carbon resources.

In 2021, China launched the world’s largest carbon market in furtherance of its “dual carbon” goals of peak emissions in 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. That same year, China set a new record for coal production, extracting over 4 billion tons. How any country could reconcile such output with rising environmental standards remains to be seen. But whatever else one can say about China’s Communist Party, they’re not averse to grand projects. Their ambitions in this case extend far beyond engineering better solar panels or retrofitting power plants: Chinese energy policy will affect everything from business investment and household consumption to climate change and international agreements. And while today’s challenges seem unprecedented, fossil fuels have long preoccupied China’s rulers. Victor Seow’s new book Carbon Technocracy offers a valuable perspective on current dilemmas by exploring three 20th-century regimes that made Chinese coal central to their plans. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made. A crucial contribution to the understandings of East Asia, of imperialism... and of science and the modern state." — Yangyang Cheng, Los Angeles Review of Books According to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, in 2019, China’s annual greenhouse gas emissions “exceeded those of all other countries combined.” 1 China’s turn to coal and the rise of its fossil fuel economy happened later and faster than for Western countries. So how did we get here? This is one of the questions behind Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. Seow offers a study of East Asia’s coal capital, Fushun Colliery–the region’s largest coal-mining operation and the birthplace of the Chinese fossil fuel economy. Carbon Technocracy is a book that traces the history of one mine yet never loses sight of Fushun’s global significance. Grounded in archival research across multiple languages, Seow’s sources range from mining records to novels and newspapers to the papers of key individuals. The book maintains, too, a robust dialogue with contemporary work across the energy and environmental humanities. It is, as Seow puts it, “A genealogy of our current predicament.” 2 Q: How is Fushun viewed today? When was it at its peak, and what factors were most critical in determining the colliery’s rise and fall?

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Q: What would you like readers to take away from Carbon Technocracy about fossil fuel production/exploitation in China and perhaps the world as a whole? Seow’s book arrives as the climatic effects of fossil fuel consumption have become alarmingly apparent everywhere. Recent floods in Pakistan exacerbated by melting glaciers, drought and unrelenting heat in China, Europe, the U.S., and all around the globe bespeak the urgency of understanding the history that Seow traces. While Carbon Technocracy does not give much cause for optimism that a transition to renewable forms of energy in China will be any less technocratic than the exploitation of fossil fuels has been, it is an insightful and engaging book that should shape conversations about East Asia and energy for years to come. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. A penetrating look at the deep links between energy extraction and technocratic governance through the history of what was once East Asia’s biggest coal mine. Perhaps what is most compelling about Seow’s work is his caution to historians not to succumb to the explanatory allure of “carbon technocracy’s vision of such extractive enterprises as defined more by the working of machines rather than the labor of humans” (p. 71). Understanding the obsession with control and rationality that informed technocratic governance must attend to their limits and the “new kinds of dependencies and, correspondingly, vulnerabilities” (p. 195) and “the fissures in the workings of carbon technocracy” (p. 164). The technocratic form of governance had immense consequences for the people who worked in the mines and the places that were transformed in name of statist goals. The ultimate contradiction of carbon technocracy, Seow points out, is that “the costs were arguably greater than the benefits” (p. 289).

There are three main things I would like folks to take away from Carbon Technocracy that relate to the exploitation of fossil fuels not only in China and Japan but across much of the industrial world. First is that states, in their aims and ambitions, were central to the rise of the fossil-fueled economy in the modern era (even as fossil fuels were key to modern state-building projects). The beauty in his crafting of the story, the weaving together of various conceptual threads, and the blending of different source materials is in how Seow both recreates the physical and mental worlds of industrial northeast China and frames up a compelling argument that helps us better understand their fabric. The work that Seow has done to pull together research from government and company records, a variety of gray literature, travel diaries, oral histories, and private collections of mining engineers from China, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States is staggering." — Andrew Watson, H-Environment Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Seow reveals the intertwined stories of the Fushun colliery and the succession of state regimes that have drawn on Fushun's material (and even rhetorical) power, from the contestation among Chinese, Russian, and Japanese interests at the turn of the last century through the consoldation of the People's Republic of China. The clarity of Seow's thinking, the felicity of his prose, and the significance of his topic will ensure a large audience among modern East Asian historians, energy historians, and the many scholars in environmental studies and environmental humanities who focus on carbon-driven climate change. Clearly written and very thoughtfully conceived." — Thomas G. Andrews, author of Killing for Coal Seow’s book arrives as the climatic effects of fossil fuel consumption have become alarmingly apparent everywhere. Recent floods in Pakistan exacerbated by melting glaciers, drought and unrelenting heat in China, Europe, the U.S., and all around the globe bespeak the urgency of understanding the history that Seow traces. While Carbon Technocracy does not give much cause for optimism that a transition to renewable forms of energy in China will be any less technocratic than the exploitation of fossil fuels has been, it is an insightful and engaging book that should shape conversations about East Asia and energy for years to come." — Maggie Clinton, positions politics Q: Can you give a brief history of the trajectory and notable moments in the colliery’s operation as it changed hands from Japanese to Chinese Nationalist and then Communist control?Victor Seow is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is a historian of technology, science and industry, specializing in China and Japan and in histories of energy and work. His first book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, was released by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year. He is currently working on a new book that examines how work becomes and functions as an object of scientific inquiry through the history of industrial psychology in China. My name is Victor Seow (pronounced “meow” with an “s”), and I am a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in China and Japan in their global contexts and in histories of energy and work. In my research, I set out to better understand how technological artifacts, scientific knowledge, and forces of production have intersected in shaping economic life and environmental outcomes in modern industrial society. This volume is a very worthy addition to the historiographical field: first and foremost for its detailed case study of such a globally significant coal mine, but also for the interesting and insightful way in which it emphasizes the interconnectedness of calorific power and political power—not just within the specific context of East Asian state-building, but also more broadly. It should most certainly be required reading for students and scholars of East Asian mining history in particular, but also for anyone interested in twentieth-century mining and energy history in general." — Ben Curtis, Labour History Review

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. Carbon Technocracy charts how modern states became embroiled in such projects of intensive energy extraction, driven as they were by concerns over economic growth, resource scarcity, and national autarky. It follows the experiences of Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats and planners, geologists and mining engineers, and labor contractors and miners to uncover the deep links between the raw materiality of the coal face and the corridors of power in Tokyo, Nanjing, Beijing, and beyond. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

This emphasis aligns with recent work including Koji Hirata, “Made in Manchuria: The Transnational Origins of Socialist Industrialization in Maoist China,” The American Historical Review, vol. 126 no. 3 (2021): 1072-1101; and Amy King, “Reconstructing China: Japanese Technicians and Industrialization in the Early Years of the People’s Republic of China,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50 no 1 (2016): 141-174 Seow's timely new book, Carbon Technocracy, offers a deeply researched account for how China came to construct its carbon economy.... Through Fushun, Seow succeeds in demonstrating how the broader global embrace of development based on fossil fuels was built on similar unstable grounds at enormous costs to human lives and the environment." — Shellen Xiao Wu, China Quarterly

Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. In any case, the colliery traces its origins to the turn of the twentieth, when Chinese merchants secured the rights from the Qing government to mine coal in Fushun. These new enterprises attracted Russian capital, and it was on the basis of that Russian investment that Japan would claim the mines as part of its spoils of war following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). The Japanese government proceeded to place the mines in the hands of the newly formed South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu), which then ran them for close to forty years. Under Mantetsu’s management, the Fushun colliery came to boast the largest coal mining operations in East Asia, and this colonial corporation deployed various techniques and technologies and mobilized tens of thousands of workers to advance its extractive endeavors. This book began as Seow’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard, a genealogy that’s apparent in the stupendous depth of research. He cites countless primary documents: Chinese, Japanese and US government records, internal Mantetsu training manuals, professional engineering journals, and much else, besides. The secondary sources across the social sciences are just as thorough, allowing him to situate the particular in the general. Thankfully, this erudition never feels forced. Rather, Seow’s considerable labor rewards readers with clear exposition of both the mine and its inhabitants.This book explores how Chinese and Japanese states, in attempting to master the fossil fuels that powered their industrial aspirations, undertook large-scale technological projects of energy extraction that ultimately exacted considerable human and environmental costs. Nowhere is this more evident than in Fushun. Although the former Coal Capital’s fortunes may now be flagging, the pattern of fossil-fueled development that enabled its rise persists into the present. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by copious carbon consumption, the history of the Fushun colliery offers us a genealogy of our current predicament. Sure thing. But first of all, I just want to thank you for taking the time to read my book and interview me about it. So, I am a historian of science and technology and of China and Japan, and my work revolves around questions of how scientific and technological developments have intersected with economic and environmental transformations in industrial East Asia. Carbon Technocracy sits squarely at the intersection of this range of interests and concerns.