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

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In Carbon Technocracy, Seow explores how political power and the fossil fuel economy became inextricably linked in the modern technocratic state. A conviction that the production and consumption of coal could serve to measure growth and modernity drove government bureaucrats to seek higher and higher output from mines like Fushun. Officials from the various states that oversaw Fushun across the decades would likely not have welcomed comparisons to their predecessors. They all, however, shared a belief in the importance of capitalizing on China’s coal resources to make their respective regimes stronger. And they all, in ways large and small, helped create the addiction to coal that China’s leaders now grapple with quitting. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 376 pp.

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. VS: Perhaps a good place for me to start is by laying out what I mean by “carbon technocracy.” So I use this term to describe a modern regime of energy extraction that is defined by a statist commitment to industrial development based on access to cheap and abundant sources of carbon energy and a desire to marshal science and technology toward this end. It is both an ideal and a sociotechnical system that the ideal helps bring into being. 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. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. 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.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 MEC: It’s now fairly common among China historians to “cross the 1949 divide” and point out continuities between the Chinese Nationalist and Chinese Communist states. What I’ve seen less frequently is also bringing the period of Japanese rule into the story and knitting the three together, as you do. How does the concept of “carbon technocracy” enable you to draw a throughline in the history of these three governing regimes? Carbon technocracy, so defined, could be observed as a striking common denominator across the otherwise different political regimes in this book, from the imperial Japanese to the Chinese Nationalists to the Chinese Communists. My contention, though, is that this extends across the industrial world, and has characterized our relationship with both fossil fuels and the sources of energy touted as alternatives to coal, oil, and gas. An exploration of the effects of intensive coal mining on the evolution of East Asian energy systems.

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. 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. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. Maura Elizabeth Cunningham (MEC): I always like to start by learning how the idea for a project came about. What were the questions or circumstances that led you to the topic of coal mining in Fushun? 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.Focusing on the history of the Fushun coal mine in Northeast China, this engaging book traces the worlds that coal made across twentieth-century East Asia. Shifting seamlessly from the abstract structures of states and economies to the everyday lives of engineers and workers, Seow tells the story of the big science, big engineering, and big technology that made up the carbon foundation of both Imperial Japan and Communist China. A probing account of the origins and challenges of the climate crisis." — Louise Young, author of Japan's Total Empire Ultimately, what does Seow’s concept of “carbon technocracy” help us to better understand? There are too many insights to adequately summarize here. Among them is how Japanese imperialists developed the coal mines in a manner that sharply limited Chinese workers’ organizing capacities both within and beyond the Fushun colliery. Their emphasis on technological refinement to maximize worker productivity (whether in terms of fingerprinting workers or improving pumping systems) inscribed racialized hierarchies and precluded civic actions on workers’ part. Seow carefully situates these developments amid rivalries between imperialist powers that commonly regarded “machines as the measure of men” and natural resource control as key to national survival. [6] Seow’s emphasis on the ways that inter-imperialist competition spurred technocratic impulses helpfully takes us away from culturalist explanations of technocracy’s appeal in East Asia (19). Further, Seow’s descriptions of mine operations show the entwinement of technological advances and fantasies of limitless carbon extraction. From this we see how groups as politically opposed as Mantetsu, the KMT, and the CCP all shared the desire to maximally extract fossil fuels and thereby created and perpetuated the logics of “carbon technocracy.” Among the tragedies of this commonality, as Seow underscores in the epilogue, is that the biosphere is indifferent to the political leanings of whoever is extracting and burning the fossil fuels. The impact of this extraction and burning also lands much more heavily on disenfranchised populations around the world. [7] Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1989) In this talk, Prof. Seow will introduce his recent book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago, 2022), which explores that question through the history of what was once the region’s largest coal mine, the Fushun colliery. Across the twentieth century, Fushun changed hands between various Chinese and Japanese states, each of which endeavoured to unearth its purportedly ‘inexhaustible’ carbon resources and employed a range of technoscientific means toward that end. By following the experiences of Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats and planners, geologists and mining engineers, and labour contractors and miners, Victor Seow uncovers the deep links between the raw materiality of the coal face and the corridors of power in Tokyo, Nanjing, Beijing and beyond, and charts how the carbon economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. In Fushun’s history, one is further confronted with hubristic attempts to tame and transform nature through technology, the misplaced valorization of machines over human beings, and productivist pursuits that strained both the environment from which coal was extracted and the many workers on whom that extractive process so deeply depended. These were all defining features of the energy regime of what Prof. Seow refers to as ‘carbon technocracy’ and the wider industrial modern world that it helped create.