Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia

"Carbon Technocracy illustrates how the rise of the fossil fuel economy in East Asia was mutually shaped by the emergence of technocratic governance in China and Japan by looking closely at the Fushun colliery in Manchuria. The colliery changed hands between the Imperial Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, and Communist Chinese governments over the first half of the twentieth century and once boasted the largest coal mining operations in East Asia. Seow examines how the Japanese and Chinese regimes became committed to large-scale, state-led energy extraction efforts even as concerns swirled over economic growth, resource scarcity, and national autarky. Pivotal to this process was the development and employment of technologies of extraction: from methods such as open-pit mining and shale oil distillation, which enabled the extraction of carbon energy, to mechanisms such as finger printing and calorie counting, which made possible a more efficient extraction of the human labor undergirding the entire enterprise. For all their differences, the regimes shared technocratic visions of industrial development based on extensive fossil fuel production and use. The reliance on carbon energy to sustain the entire system engendered a widespread tension that persists today, a tension between the fear of scarcity and a faith in finding near limitless supply, often thanks to science and technology"--
A look at the deep links between energy extraction and technocratic governance through the history of what was once East Asia's biggest coal mine. 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. In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists pursued intensive energy extraction and deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage to maximize their hauls. At the same time, as much as these mine operators idealized the might of the machine and the fossil fuels that drove it, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on human labor. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to both the productivist demands of states and markets and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that enabled its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by the profligate 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.