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

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Throughout the book, the mine acquires agency of its own, an insatiable force that swallows the adjacent town and countless lives. Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, Victor Seow (University of Chicago Press, April 2022) 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. Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. 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

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. We are excited to announce a new title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series: Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, published by the University of Chicago Press. The book's author Victor Seow is assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. 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.Seow shows that civilizations built on coal undermine their own foundations with each strike of the shovel. His exploration of carbon technocracy highlights how the desire for technological progress and development runs along a deep seam of violence. Profoundly humane and thoughtful." — Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival 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 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. Chapters five and six document the transfer of the Fushun mines to Chinese control following Japan’s 1945 defeat, first to the Nationalist Party and then, by 1948, to the victorious Communist Party. Seow details how the Nationalist Party had been struggling, with limited financial resources and against multiple obstacles, since the 1920s to uncover and develop China’s coal and oil deposits. After full-scale war broke out against Japan in 1937, the powerful, technocrat-dominated National Resources Commission took charge of this endeavor and assumed control over Fushun once the Soviets retreated from Manchuria. Rendering the mines productive again after their wartime hyper-exploitation would have been difficult enough, but the Nationalists faced the added complication that the Soviets had plundered relevant machinery during their brief occupation. (As Seow explains, the CCP awkwardly navigated this plunder during the 1950s heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation, 262). Despite the Nationalists’ inability to revitalize the mines, Seow concludes, “if we were to use the textbook definition of ‘technocracy’ as a ‘government of engineers,’ the [Nationalist] Chinese state actually appears to have come closer to that ideal than its Japanese counterpart” (254). Moreover, Seow argues in chapter six that the Communists took up this technocratic legacy with fervor in their management of Fushun. With a production-first ethos, the CCP employed Japanese engineers to help restore the mines to their prewar capacities, as had the Nationalists (pp. 263-269). [5] Following Lenin in regarding coal as the “grain of industry,” CCP leaders regarded ever-increasing extraction as key to socialist modernization, from the mechanization of food production to the development of urban transport and housing (270). According to Seow, Communist efforts to overturn inherited hierarchies of expertise made little headway at Fushun, where the idea was enshrined instead that “useful knowledge, be it from formally trained engineers or experienced workers, was that which helped further production for the advancement of the state.” (282). Among other things, the 1958 Great Leap Forward and ensuing catastrophic famine revealed the disastrous consequences of relentless coal-fired productivism. Carbon Technocracy’s thoughtful epilogue brings the story up to the present, highlighting Fushun’s “exhausted limits” as well as the deepened dependency of both China and Japan on fossil fuels during the past sixty years.

Kurt Bloch, “Coal and Power Shortage in Japan,” Far East Survey 9, no.4 (February 1940): 39-45; quotation on 39. 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 The timeline of Seow’s book is roughly 1900 to 1960, from Fushun’s birth as a large industrial enterprise under Japanese imperialism to China’s Great Leap Forward. Along the way, Seow traces the impact of two world wars on the rise of carbon technocracy and coins the term “warscape of intensification,” a play on “landscape of intensification,” to describe how warfare in the first half of the twentieth century “drove an escalating demand for energy.” 8 Not just wars but their aftermaths and interstitial periods prove crucial to the history of Fushun. When the Soviets occupied Manchuria after Japan’s surrender in World War II, for example, they did long-term damage to the mine with major impacts for later mineworkers and the environment around Fushun. It proved impossible for years afterward to keep the tunnels properly drained and maintained, extending the violence of the war into the mining accidents that would follow. Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations 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.Years of research allow Seow to trace the multifarious consequences of seemingly mundane geology. To say he mastered the technical minutia is to risk considerable understatement. Seow delineates coal’s role in East Asia’s industrialization, tracing its mutual dependence with every sinew of the wider society." — James Herndon, Asian Review of Books The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. 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. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

The Center for the Study of Contemporary China was honored to co-host Assistant Professor Victor Seow from Harvard University’s History of Science Department for the Carbon Technocracy seminar on September 8. During his presentation, Seow introduced three main interventions: energy transitions and the modern state, imperial industrialization and the economic legacies of the empire, and the connections between technology, labor, and extraction. China, the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels today, has until recently been neglected by energy historians. Carbon Technocracy corrects this injustice with great erudition and depth. Seow, an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University, has spent more than a decade studying the Fushun colliery, known for most of the twentieth century as East Asia's coal capital. The result is a fascinating case study on the history of a fossil fuel hub under different political regimes over more than a century." — Clarence Hatton-Proulx, Environment and HistoryThe question of peak, if we are to determine it just by output, would be 1960, in the midst of the disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign that resulted in a famine claiming tens of millions of lives. That year, the colliery produced twice as much coal as it did at the high point under Mantetsu’s management in 1936. I am the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), a study of the deep links between energy extraction and technocratic politics through the history of East Asia’s onetime largest coal mine. In delving into the origins of fossil-fueled development in China and Japan, this book unearths both the dominant role of the state in energy transitions toward coal and oil and the enduring reliance on human labor power in the carbon age. A particular strength of this book lies in Seow’s befitting elucidation of the science and technology of coal mining, which allows the materiality of Fushun’s coal deposits to shine through the convoluted social, political, and economic realities of energy regimes…. This is a book of the history of technology with substantive technology." — Ju-Yi Roshnii Chou and Kuang-chi Hung, East Asian Science, Technology and Society 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).

MEC: One element of your book that I really appreciate is how you play with scale. A good portion of Carbon Technocracy examines big-picture politics and events, and you depict the mine at Fushun as a massive endeavor that inspires awe, embodying what you term the “technological sublime.” Yet you never lose sight of the individual, especially those laboring in the mines. What was the human factor within carbon technocracy, and how did miners themselves promote or resist the imperatives of the state’s endeavors? 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] 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. 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? Q: What is “carbon technocracy,” and where else might this system be observed? [How might future research expand on what you have found through the case of Fushun?]

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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