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

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.According to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, in 2019, China’s annual greenhouse gas emissions “exceeded those of all other countries combined.” 1 China’s turn to coal and the rise of its fossil fuel economy happened later and faster than for Western countries. So how did we get here? This is one of the questions behind Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. Seow offers a study of East Asia’s coal capital, Fushun Colliery–the region’s largest coal-mining operation and the birthplace of the Chinese fossil fuel economy. Carbon Technocracy is a book that traces the history of one mine yet never loses sight of Fushun’s global significance. Grounded in archival research across multiple languages, Seow’s sources range from mining records to novels and newspapers to the papers of key individuals. The book maintains, too, a robust dialogue with contemporary work across the energy and environmental humanities. It is, as Seow puts it, “A genealogy of our current predicament.” 2 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 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? 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. 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. Carbon Technocracy charts how modern states became embroiled in such projects of intensive energy extraction, driven as they were by concerns over economic growth, resource scarcity, and national autarky. It follows the experiences of Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats and planners, geologists and mining engineers, and labor contractors and miners to uncover the deep links between the raw materiality of the coal face and the corridors of power in Tokyo, Nanjing, Beijing, and beyond.

In regard to the human factor in carbon technocracy, this is, to me, one of the idealized fictions of this energy regime. Carbon technocracy promotes the use of fossil-fueled machines for productivist purposes and imagines a diminished reliance upon labor, which its adherents often deemed unreliable at best. The massive open-pit mine that came to represent the Fushun colliery was, in a sense, a materialization of these notions. Still, as the demand for output continued to grow and operations further expanded, so too did the dependence on workers and their human energy. Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso 2011). Seow’s approach to technocracy also draws from Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002)

Throughout the book, the mine acquires agency of its own, an insatiable force that swallows the adjacent town and countless lives. Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, Victor Seow (University of Chicago Press, April 2022) Perhaps what is most compelling about Seow’s work is his caution to historians not to succumb to the explanatory allure of “carbon technocracy’s vision of such extractive enterprises as defined more by the working of machines rather than the labor of humans” (p. 71). Understanding the obsession with control and rationality that informed technocratic governance must attend to their limits and the “new kinds of dependencies and, correspondingly, vulnerabilities” (p. 195) and “the fissures in the workings of carbon technocracy” (p. 164). The technocratic form of governance had immense consequences for the people who worked in the mines and the places that were transformed in name of statist goals. The ultimate contradiction of carbon technocracy, Seow points out, is that “the costs were arguably greater than the benefits” (p. 289). Kurt Bloch, “Coal and Power Shortage in Japan,” Far East Survey 9, no.4 (February 1940): 39-45; quotation on 39.

An exploration of the effects of intensive coal mining on the evolution of East Asian energy systems. 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 Q: How is Fushun viewed today? When was it at its peak, and what factors were most critical in determining the colliery’s rise and fall? 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. 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.

The University of Chicago Press

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. 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. 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