By Maya Peak, Class of 2025
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.
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 the demand for power grows what does the production of coal-based energy mean for the people who use that energy and provide that energy? Individuals such as Goto Shimpei developed his ideas on scientific colonialism, in the context of a growing carbon technocracy, a growing database on scientific knowledge developed under the pretense of colonialism. Kitamura Yoshio developed a method of draining methane from collieries to lessen the chances of lethal accidents when extracting materials. While technology and means for historical analysis grow rapidly under industrialization and energy extraction, at the same time, laborers are put under harsher conditions. For instance, the reduction in safety precautions for workers led to an incident in which 917 people died back in the nineteen hundreds. When considering the different industries that were built for farming energy and therefore, power, an understanding of carbon technocracy considers not only what are the ecological limits to economic growth, but also defies those limits. One must instead question what costs there will be, how many people will take the strain of an empire.
Yosano Akiko once visited the Fushun Colliery back in the twentieth century and described it as, “a frightful and grotesque form of a monster from the earth, opening its large maw towards the sky. However, after going down a little and standing atop the manmade steps, I sensed a certain grandeur a few times greater than that of a large coliseum from Roman times and felt that human beings who would use nature in such a way were like intelligent species of ant.” This mine and the engineers, experts, the shale industry, the Winding Tower, all the pieces that make the Carbon Technocracy in East Asia is what Victor Seow described as a story of “a deep fear of scarcity [and] a fantasy of limitless wealth.” These two factors shaped a colliery that is not a monster, but is the embodiment of industrialization within the twentieth century and a reflection of technology today.
