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

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Chapters five and six document the transfer of the Fushun mines to Chinese control following Japan’s 1945 defeat, first to the Nationalist Party and then, by 1948, to the victorious Communist Party. Seow details how the Nationalist Party had been struggling, with limited financial resources and against multiple obstacles, since the 1920s to uncover and develop China’s coal and oil deposits. After full-scale war broke out against Japan in 1937, the powerful, technocrat-dominated National Resources Commission took charge of this endeavor and assumed control over Fushun once the Soviets retreated from Manchuria. Rendering the mines productive again after their wartime hyper-exploitation would have been difficult enough, but the Nationalists faced the added complication that the Soviets had plundered relevant machinery during their brief occupation. (As Seow explains, the CCP awkwardly navigated this plunder during the 1950s heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation, 262). Despite the Nationalists’ inability to revitalize the mines, Seow concludes, “if we were to use the textbook definition of ‘technocracy’ as a ‘government of engineers,’ the [Nationalist] Chinese state actually appears to have come closer to that ideal than its Japanese counterpart” (254). Moreover, Seow argues in chapter six that the Communists took up this technocratic legacy with fervor in their management of Fushun. With a production-first ethos, the CCP employed Japanese engineers to help restore the mines to their prewar capacities, as had the Nationalists (pp. 263-269). [5] Following Lenin in regarding coal as the “grain of industry,” CCP leaders regarded ever-increasing extraction as key to socialist modernization, from the mechanization of food production to the development of urban transport and housing (270). According to Seow, Communist efforts to overturn inherited hierarchies of expertise made little headway at Fushun, where the idea was enshrined instead that “useful knowledge, be it from formally trained engineers or experienced workers, was that which helped further production for the advancement of the state.” (282). Among other things, the 1958 Great Leap Forward and ensuing catastrophic famine revealed the disastrous consequences of relentless coal-fired productivism. Carbon Technocracy’s thoughtful epilogue brings the story up to the present, highlighting Fushun’s “exhausted limits” as well as the deepened dependency of both China and Japan on fossil fuels during the past sixty years. Striving for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Asian Studies: Humanities Grants for Asian Studies Scholars

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. With the support of the Harvard University Asia Center, I convene the Science and Technology in Asia online seminar series, which showcases some of the latest and most exciting work in the history and social studies of science, technology, medicine, and the environment centered on East, South, and Southeast Asia. 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. 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. 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?

Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia

Defined as “a technopolitical system grounded in the idealization of extensive fossil fuel exploitation through mechanical and managerial means” (p. 8), Seow employs the concept of carbon technocracy to help historians rethink technocracy “less in terms of the number of engineering experts holding high office and more in terms of the extent to which a narrowly defined technoscientific rationality wedded to a proclivity for planning directed the practice of statecraft, regardless of who filled the upper echelons of government” (p. 254). The book includes plenty of details about specific individuals and organizations, such as the Japanese railway company Mantetsu and the Communist government’s Mining Affairs Bureau, but the efforts to connect so many actors often obscures the distinction between the industry leaders, businessmen, engineers and professionals, and actual government bureaucrats and politicians. In some cases, Seow places the focus on those with technical expertise, in others on the executive officers of large corporations, and then also on both military leaders and civilian officials who together, but at different times, in different places, in different ways, comprised the “technocracy.” Creating such a broad umbrella term helps conceptualize the abstract relationship between material energy resources and attempts to plan or control their use while at the same time conflating important distinctions between the shifting power among these various actors. It is never entirely clear who is being implicated when the carbon technocracy is invoked. We know that workers have little agency, but it is not always clear who wields power. 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 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.

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. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. 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. 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 EmpireI 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.