Carbon Technocracy

"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"--