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

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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 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. 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? To cite just one example: coal’s carbon content dictates whether it feeds into energy production or metallurgy. Fushun had both types in enormous quantities, making it a prize far more valuable than mines in, say, Sichuan or Korea. 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: agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing, and (especially) the military. The evolution of mining techniques could have made for dull reading, but time and again, this book humanizes the engineers and workers who adapted foreign technology to local conditions. Men such as the Scottish-trained Kimura Tadao, who adjusted methods from Edinburgh to optimize shale oil extraction for Mantetsu, or the humble laborer Wei Xijiu, who perfected a method for muffling noise from old Japanese drills still running the 1950s. Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso 2011). Seow’s approach to technocracy also draws from Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002) 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 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 connects decades surrounding East Asia’s energy production to develop a complex connection between energy in the elemental, carbon sense to power in the political and economic sense. Fushun Colliery, for example, was an open-pit coal mine that opened in the early twentieth century as a crucial resource to a rapidly developing nation. Since its founding, it has been seized by different political powers: Communist and Nationalist, Japanese and Russian, and seen the change in carbon technology used to mine it. As the world grew greater needs for energy, greater technology was not the only thing that needed to accommodate massive needs in energy. Greater demands on coal and coal-based energy put greater strain on workers themselves. Overworking and harsher conditions all contributed to the history of a mine and the people who were involved in its production, its laborers, its overseers, its experts. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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 ReviewThe 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 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. Although the three states I looked at differed from each other in various ways, from professed political ideology to capacity, they each take up carbon technocracy in one way or another. And at a basic level, the book seeks to underscore this common denominator. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1989)

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? 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 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. This predicament is, of course, climate change, and one of the book’s key contributions to discussions of this predicament is its theorization of technocracy, which Seow calls a “distinctive sociotechnical apparatus that presented itself as the epitome of modernity–universal, scientific, inevitable.” 3 Seow traces Fushun’s history across several political regimes: Japanese imperialism, Soviet occupation, Chinese Nationalism, and Chinese Communism. A technocratic vision persisted under each system. Indeed, the nature of the surrounding political context mattered far less than one might expect in the approach to mining that was taken over the years at Fushun. The drive for increasing output, for “ever-escalating output targets,” for growth, was the governing force, whether motivated by capitalist profits or communist five-year plans. 4 In part this was because subsequent iterations of the mine took shape within the footprint of Japanese imperialism, under which Fushun had first been developed. But it was also because “carbon technocracy” was the guiding principle behind every economic and political regime’s conception of the mine. Seow defines carbon technocracy as a “system grounded in the idealization of extensive fossil fuel exploitation,” equating fossil fuels with progress, and generating a relentless demand for more coal. 5

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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.

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 Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 376 pp. 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?]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]