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

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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. Victor Seow is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is a historian of technology, science and industry, specializing in China and Japan and in histories of energy and work. His first book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, was released by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year. He is currently working on a new book that examines how work becomes and functions as an object of scientific inquiry through the history of industrial psychology in China. Kurt Bloch, “Coal and Power Shortage in Japan,” Far East Survey 9, no.4 (February 1940): 39-45; quotation on 39.

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. And I have been giving additional thought to writing of late because of the work I am doing on my next book. This is a history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s, when the first study in this subfield was carried out, to the present, in which it exists, as elsewhere, in its contemporary form as industrial-organizational psychology. By tracing this history, I seek to examine how work becomes and functions as an object of scientific inquiry and how the sciences of work intersect with larger social discourses about the nature and value of labor. Throughout the book, the mine acquires agency of its own, an insatiable force that swallows the adjacent town and countless lives. But in every chapter Seow reminds readers of the human beings in and around Fushun: people like Liu Baoyu, powerless to halt Mantetsu’s destruction of his ancestral burial plot, Mo Desheng, a child hiding amongst his family’s corpses during a wartime massacre, and Xiao Jun, the Fushun miner purged by the CCP when his novel Coal Mines in May paid insufficient homage to the Party. 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.A penetrating look at the deep links between energy extraction and technocratic governance through the history of what was once East Asia’s biggest coal mine. I am currently researching and writing my next book, tentatively titled " The Human Factor: A History of Science, Work, and the Politics of Production." Through a history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the present, this book asks how work became a subject of scientific inquiry and how the sciences of work shaped and have been shaped by the wider politics of production. For this project, I am currently finishing an ALM in industrial and organizational psychology at the Harvard Extension School. 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?

At the same time, one major point that the book makes is that the technological and infrastructural legacies of the Japanese empire in Manchuria served as an important foundation for the post-1949 Chinese state’s pursuit of carbon technocracy and socialist industrialization. Here I join scholars who have advanced a similar argument such as Ramon Myers, Matsumoto Toshirō, Daqing Yang, Amy King, and Koji Hirata. 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. The second takeaway is that there has been a persistent tension between fears of energy scarcity and hopes of accessing limitless supplies of power, primarily through technoscientific means, and that the latter has been a pipe dream predicated on false promises of being able to sustain escalating levels of material consumption as though resources were inexhaustible and our planetary system able to remain habitable in spite of our excesses. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1989)

The University of Chicago Press

The Center for the Study of Contemporary China was honored to co-host Assistant Professor Victor Seow from Harvard University’s History of Science Department for the Carbon Technocracy seminar on September 8. During his presentation, Seow introduced three main interventions: energy transitions and the modern state, imperial industrialization and the economic legacies of the empire, and the connections between technology, labor, and extraction. 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. Edmund Burke once asked the House of Commons to “get out of general discourses, and vague sentiments, which … had been one of the main causes of our present troubles, and to appreciate the value of the several plans that were, or might be proposed, by an exact detail of particulars.” That was good advice for handling a crisis in 1776, and even better today. Victor Seow has taken Burke’s wisdom to heart, writing a book that shows how and why details matter. One can only hope that a few policymakers take the time to consider them, as well.

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 China, the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels today, has until recently been neglected by energy historians. Carbon Technocracy corrects this injustice with great erudition and depth. Seow, an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University, has spent more than a decade studying the Fushun colliery, known for most of the twentieth century as East Asia's coal capital. The result is a fascinating case study on the history of a fossil fuel hub under different political regimes over more than a century." — Clarence Hatton-Proulx, Environment and History 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 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. 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): 141-174An exploration of the effects of intensive coal mining on the evolution of East Asian energy systems. 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?

VS: Perhaps a good place for me to start is by laying out what I mean by “carbon technocracy.” So I use this term to describe a modern regime of energy extraction that is defined by a statist commitment to industrial development based on access to cheap and abundant sources of carbon energy and a desire to marshal science and technology toward this end. It is both an ideal and a sociotechnical system that the ideal helps bring into being. At Harvard, I offer a range of courses on the history of science and technology in China and East Asia and on topics related to industrial society more broadly, such as the history of the factory and the sciences of work. I advise graduate students working on science and technology in China, Japan, and Korea, as well as those focusing on other geographical areas who are interested in the nexus of technology, capitalism, and the environment. My work with graduate students has been recognized with the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.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 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 Carbon Technocracy has received several awards, including the Association for Asian Studies' John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Chinese Historians in the United States' Academic Excellence Award, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History. There are three main things I would like folks to take away from Carbon Technocracy that relate to the exploitation of fossil fuels not only in China and Japan but across much of the industrial world. First is that states, in their aims and ambitions, were central to the rise of the fossil-fueled economy in the modern era (even as fossil fuels were key to modern state-building projects).