Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia

by Victor Seow

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.

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.

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. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. 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. 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.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Technology, Economics, Geography

384 pages, Hardcover

Published March 28, 2022

Reviews

[Floris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carbon Technocracy follows the history of the Fushun coal mine, from the early discoveries of the rock in the region through to the late 1950s. This history reads like a fossil-fuelled frenzy to by the Japanese, Russians, and Chinese to exploit the area’s energy resources, as they sought to power their Empire/Nationalist State/Communist State (delete as necessary) on Fushun coal. Seow narrates how extraction was facilitated by large- and small-scale technological projects and advances, but also by a long history of human and environmental sacrifice. This dualism speaks to the underlining warning that this book speaks to: ‘if coal has been central to the making of the industrial world, then this black rock is also very much complicit in its unmaking’ (17). Making, because as Seow argues, calorific and political power both combined to produce the modern industrial state – something he believes holds true beyond the east Asian context. Unmaking, because Fushun’s history of environmental degradation acts as a “chilling microcosm” of global climate change today (35 – this is mostly discussed in the Epilogue).

To me at least, these arguments sound far from original. Nevertheless, this book deserves the accolades it has received over the past two years for the way it presents them. Seow draws from an impressive amount of archival material, in both Japanese and Chinese, from a range of historical actors (i.e. not just high-level government documents, but also news reports and interviews). He writes with clarity and precision about mining practices and terminology, combining these with very human insights into the reality of being a worker in the coal industry (some of the vignettes in particular are wonderfully lucid). He makes occasional links to other scholarship in the history of technology and environmental history, some of which could have been expanded further, but he generally remains focused on Fushun and its fate. This did mean that the book started to become a bit dry (repetitive) near the end, as I was reading about the umpteenth figure of tonnes of coal extracted or – more distressingly – miners killed in an explosion. But I suppose this also drives home the argument about the continuities between imperial and communist regimes in Fushun – the hallmarks of “Carbon Technocracy”.

[Ikhlas Tawazun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intensely historical, strongly analytical, and very insightful to understand the governance and development of not just carbon extraction, but the modern, capitalist country--especially but not limited to East Asia.

[Crystal Yu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not so good, the author needs to examine Chinese research.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Above and beyond the story of a massive coal mine in northeast China over the course of the twentieth century, this book demonstrates how government policies promoted fossil fuels and how national, regional, and global economies and political institutions came to depend on this energy. The story is greatly complicated by the fact that at various times the mine was operated under the control of China or Japan, including both nationalist and communist regimes in the former.

[Ed]

An amazing overview of the coal capital of China, Fushun, that brings together a variety of Chinese and Japanese-language sources to argue compellingly about how industrial society's foundation of carbon pollutes not only the world, but also how states interact with labour and knowledge.

In pursuit of productivity gains, East Asian energy regimes sought increasing control over workers, other states, and nature. In doing so, it empowered technical experts, scientists, and managers who could harness the condensed energy of millions of years and gave them control over the state, market, and labour as well. Seow makes clear that Imperial Japan and the two Chinese states, latecomers to industrial capitalism, did not have the luxury of letting the (imperial) market take the lead, perhaps making state and society's reliance on carbon all the more obvious and fragile. This is seen in wartime Japan's breakneck industrialization and its micromanagement of its vast energy empire as it fell under its own weight: Bitumous coal from Kyushu to Korea, forging steel for industry, Anthracite coal from Pyongyang to imperial warships, fighting to secure oil in Southeast Asia, and, at the heart of it all, Fuhsun's open-pit mine spewing forth the "limitless" treasure house of the world powered by tens-of-thousands of human bodies.

The domination of nature necessarily intertwines with the domination of humans. The limitless abundance coal promised was just an illusion. Still, the technologies it bequeathed like fingerprinting, the corporatist management style, and implements that increased productivity and devalued labour have impacts lasting to our present day.