Carbon Technocracy
Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
9780226826554
9780226721996
9780226812601
9780226831527
Carbon Technocracy
Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
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.
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.
376 pages | 25 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2021
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Asian Studies: East Asia
History: Asian History, Environmental History, History of Technology
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Note on Conventions
Introduction / Carbon Technocracy /
One / Vertical Natures /
Two / Technological Enterprise /
Three / Fueling Anxieties /
Four / Imperial Extraction /
Five / Nationalist Reconstruction /
Six / Socialist Industrialization /
Epilogue / Exhausted Limits /
Acknowledgments /
Bibliography /
Index /
Note on Conventions
Introduction / Carbon Technocracy /
One / Vertical Natures /
Two / Technological Enterprise /
Three / Fueling Anxieties /
Four / Imperial Extraction /
Five / Nationalist Reconstruction /
Six / Socialist Industrialization /
Epilogue / Exhausted Limits /
Acknowledgments /
Bibliography /
Index /
Excerpt
I came in search of the origins of China’s modern industrialization. I found, instead, the beginnings of its end. Before arriving in the coal-mining city of Fushun in the summer of 2011, I had seen old photographs and read historical accounts of its colossal open pit, first excavated by Japanese technocrats almost a century earlier. Pictures of the site showed an expansive industrial landscape molded by the machine: large excavators, electric- and steam- powered shovels, and dump cars hewing rock and moving earth to bring the cavity into being. The Japanese poet Yosano Akiko 與謝野晶子(1878–1942), who visited Fushun in 1928, described the mine as “a ghastly and grotesque form of a monster from the earth, opening its large maw toward the sky.” At first glance, the real thing did not disappoint.
It would have been easy to mistake the gigantic depression in the ground for a natural formation such as a valley were the sides not cut into steps of recognizable regularity: like terrace farming, but for harvesting shale and coal. I had been brought to the pit by a colliery representative eager to show off the sight. As our car trundled down a rocky road into its depths, I could not help but notice that the mine was far less busy than I had anticipated. Along our descent, we passed by a single dump truck loaded with debris. Imposing though it was— its wheels twice the height of our sedan— it appeared to be the only sign of work on site. Overhead, the sky was almost too blue for an industrial city, certainly so for one that for decades boasted East Asia’s largest coal-mining operations and that was once known as “Coal Capital” (in Chinese, 煤都; in Japanese, 炭都).
Fushun is located in Liaoning, the southernmost of the three provinces that make up China’s Northeast—a region formerly referred to as “Manchuria.” Sandwiched between layers of green mudstone, oil shale, tuff, and basalt, massive stores of coal lie beneath the city. For the past hundred or so years, this coal has been mined in spades. The South Manchuria Railway Company (南滿洲鐵道株式會社; “Mantetsu” [滿鐵], for short), the Japanese colonial corporation that ran Fushun’s coal mines for much of the first half of the twentieth century, developed them into an extractive enterprise of staggering proportions. In 1933, Fushun accounted for almost four-fifths of Manchuria’s coal output and more than a sixth of the coal produced in the Japanese metropole and its colonies. It was the pitch-black heart of Japan’s empire of energy.
The Chinese Communists continued to exploit Fushun’s carbon resources after taking control of the area in 1948. In 1952, this colliery, then till China’s largest, produced over 8 percent of the country’s coal. Decades later, the speed and scale of its extraction have proven unsustainable. Fushun’s current annual output is less than three million tons, roughly a third of its 1936 prewar peak and a sixth of its 1960 postwar height. Wasteful mining practices in the past have compromised present and future production. While about a third of the estimated 1.5 billion tons of total coal deposits remain in the ground, mining these reserves risks triggering landslides and subsidence that have caused infrastructure to crack and buildings to sink. According to a 2012 government report, as much as two-thirds of Fushun’s urban area rests on unstable ground. As one recent commentator puts it, “today the mineral that helped turn the city into a booming metropolis of 2.2 million threatens to bury it.”
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.
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.
The coal mined at Fushun and at other sites of energy extraction around the globe catalyzed a distinctive sociotechnical apparatus that presented itself as the epitome of modernity— universal, scientific, inevitable. For all their differences as political regimes, the imperial Japanese, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist states that controlled Fushun at varying times shared a decidedly technocratic vision in relation to carbon resources. This vision involved marshalling science and technology toward the exploitation of fossil fuels for statist ends. It was further characterized by an embrace of coal- fired development, a focus on heavy industrial expansion, a fixation on national autarky, an interest in labor-saving mechanization, a privileging of cheap energy, and a pegging of economic growth to increases in coal production and consumption. At the same time, that states saw in carbon energy a means to modernity engendered for them tensions between a fear of fuel scarcity and a faith in securing, largely through technoscientific means, a near limitless fuel supply. The emergence of this particularly modern regime of energy extraction that I call “carbon technocracy” is the subject of this book.
It would have been easy to mistake the gigantic depression in the ground for a natural formation such as a valley were the sides not cut into steps of recognizable regularity: like terrace farming, but for harvesting shale and coal. I had been brought to the pit by a colliery representative eager to show off the sight. As our car trundled down a rocky road into its depths, I could not help but notice that the mine was far less busy than I had anticipated. Along our descent, we passed by a single dump truck loaded with debris. Imposing though it was— its wheels twice the height of our sedan— it appeared to be the only sign of work on site. Overhead, the sky was almost too blue for an industrial city, certainly so for one that for decades boasted East Asia’s largest coal-mining operations and that was once known as “Coal Capital” (in Chinese, 煤都; in Japanese, 炭都).
Fushun is located in Liaoning, the southernmost of the three provinces that make up China’s Northeast—a region formerly referred to as “Manchuria.” Sandwiched between layers of green mudstone, oil shale, tuff, and basalt, massive stores of coal lie beneath the city. For the past hundred or so years, this coal has been mined in spades. The South Manchuria Railway Company (南滿洲鐵道株式會社; “Mantetsu” [滿鐵], for short), the Japanese colonial corporation that ran Fushun’s coal mines for much of the first half of the twentieth century, developed them into an extractive enterprise of staggering proportions. In 1933, Fushun accounted for almost four-fifths of Manchuria’s coal output and more than a sixth of the coal produced in the Japanese metropole and its colonies. It was the pitch-black heart of Japan’s empire of energy.
The Chinese Communists continued to exploit Fushun’s carbon resources after taking control of the area in 1948. In 1952, this colliery, then till China’s largest, produced over 8 percent of the country’s coal. Decades later, the speed and scale of its extraction have proven unsustainable. Fushun’s current annual output is less than three million tons, roughly a third of its 1936 prewar peak and a sixth of its 1960 postwar height. Wasteful mining practices in the past have compromised present and future production. While about a third of the estimated 1.5 billion tons of total coal deposits remain in the ground, mining these reserves risks triggering landslides and subsidence that have caused infrastructure to crack and buildings to sink. According to a 2012 government report, as much as two-thirds of Fushun’s urban area rests on unstable ground. As one recent commentator puts it, “today the mineral that helped turn the city into a booming metropolis of 2.2 million threatens to bury it.”
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.
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.
The coal mined at Fushun and at other sites of energy extraction around the globe catalyzed a distinctive sociotechnical apparatus that presented itself as the epitome of modernity— universal, scientific, inevitable. For all their differences as political regimes, the imperial Japanese, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist states that controlled Fushun at varying times shared a decidedly technocratic vision in relation to carbon resources. This vision involved marshalling science and technology toward the exploitation of fossil fuels for statist ends. It was further characterized by an embrace of coal- fired development, a focus on heavy industrial expansion, a fixation on national autarky, an interest in labor-saving mechanization, a privileging of cheap energy, and a pegging of economic growth to increases in coal production and consumption. At the same time, that states saw in carbon energy a means to modernity engendered for them tensions between a fear of fuel scarcity and a faith in securing, largely through technoscientific means, a near limitless fuel supply. The emergence of this particularly modern regime of energy extraction that I call “carbon technocracy” is the subject of this book.
Awards
Chinese Historians in the United States: CHUS Academic Excellence Award
Won
International Studies Association: Global Development Studies Book Award
Honorable Mention
Business History Conference: Hagley Prize
Finalist
Association for Asian Studies: John Whitney Hall Book Prize
Won
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations: Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History
Won
Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship
Won