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

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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 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

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 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 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 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. 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?

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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 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.

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit, once the largest in Asia. Across the twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted pit remains a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and to the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. An exploration of the effects of intensive coal mining on the evolution of East Asian energy systems. In Fushun’s history, one is 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 carbon technocracy and the wider industrial modern world that it helped create.Kate Larsen, Hannah Pitt, Mikhail Grant, and Trevor Houser, “China’s Greenhouse GasEmissions Exceeded the Developed World for the First Time in 2019,” Rhodium Group, May 6, 2021.