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

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MEC: Finally, what has captured your attention lately—as a reader, writer, historian, professor, or person living in the world? 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

Victor Seow (VS): As with many other scholars and their first projects, I took a somewhat long and winding path to Fushun and coal mining. 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. Sure thing. But first of all, I just want to thank you for taking the time to read my book and interview me about it. So, I am a historian of science and technology and of China and Japan, and my work revolves around questions of how scientific and technological developments have intersected with economic and environmental transformations in industrial East Asia. Carbon Technocracy sits squarely at the intersection of this range of interests and concerns.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. Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations As I started digging further into Fushun’s history, though, I soon realized that there was a complex and fascinating story that one could tell about the coal itself. Influenced in part by the materialist turn and how an attention to the physicality of things might yield insights into social processes, I decided that I wanted to tell that story. One of the things I then did was to enroll in an economic geology course that was offered in the earth and planetary sciences department here. Through this course and its various components, which included a petroleum geochemistry lab and a field trip to a working colliery, I learned a ton about coal and other fossil fuels, which helped me to better make sense of the sources I was collecting and reading and to write slightly more textured narratives about these energy resources.

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. 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." — Maggie Clinton, positions politicsA crucial contribution to the understandings of East Asia, of imperialism... and of science and the modern state." — Yangyang Cheng, Los Angeles Review of Books Carbon technocracy, so defined, could be observed as a striking common denominator across the otherwise different political regimes in this book, from the imperial Japanese to the Chinese Nationalists to the Chinese Communists. My contention, though, is that this extends across the industrial world, and has characterized our relationship with both fossil fuels and the sources of energy touted as alternatives to coal, oil, and gas. 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.

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. 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?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 Kurt Bloch, “Coal and Power Shortage in Japan,” Far East Survey 9, no.4 (February 1940): 39-45; quotation on 39. 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 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. 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.