During the past year, countries around the world have experienced devastating natural disasters as a result of record-breaking extreme weather. In China alone, extended heatwaves, flash flooding and drought struck different parts of the country in turn. The bill for the effects of our dependence on fossil fuels has arrived and is now due.

In this new normal for the Anthropocene, the “age of man,” Victor Seow's timely new book, Carbon Technocracy, offers a deeply researched account for how China came to construct its carbon economy. Seow argues that a technocratic class not only engineered the mass excavation of fossil fuels but also promoted a set of ideals “inextricably linked to the energy regime of coal” (p. 11).

Seow's account begins with the Japanese empire at the start of the 20th century. Japan expanded its control over northeast China after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). In 1906, the Japanese government set up a “semi-public, semi-private” corporation, Mantetsu, to manage the railroad and oversee extensive surveys of Manchuria. These early geological studies revealed the rich potential of the Fushun coalfields.

Ogawa Takuji, a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University's geology department, and mining engineer Ohashi Takichi were among the first of a generation of Asian technocrats whose vision of an industrial state run by fossil fuels would transform Fushun, Asia and the modern world (p. 45). What follows is a richly entangled narrative of how the technology of energy extraction and the mechanisms of surveillance both helped to enforce the labour regime, from fingerprinting, electric fences and watchtowers, to, during the war, the use of forced labour (p. 105).

From the beginning, Japan's new acquisitions in Manchuria combined scientific efforts with the colonial project of domination and control. The latest technologies and mechanization helped Fushun become the coal capital and largest coal mine in Asia. The Longfeng mine's winding tower, one of the tallest in the world, and the colossal open pit mine vied as the primary symbol of the colliery (p. 179). Beneath these vast technological wonders, human beings toiled in a harsh labour regime that valued the machinery more than expendable lives. An explosion at the mines in 1917 killed 470 Chinese workers. Japanese managers blamed such accidents on the ignorance of the Chinese labourers and their failure to follow safety regulations.

The increasingly harsh labour conditions at the colliery mirrored the growing violence in Manchukuo, where incidents like the 1932 massacre of civilians in the village of Pingdingshan in southeastern Fushun saw the Japanese military execute three thousand villagers as retaliation for Chinese resistance and sabotage of mining facilities (p. 162). The violence is both shocking and a natural extension of the systemic violence of the Japanese empire's industrial vision – at whatever cost to local workers and the environment. Japanese war aims in the 1930s and 1940s intensified demands at the colliery, a centrepiece of the imperial industrial plan in the wartime “managed economy” (p. 164).

By the autumn of 1936, the Manchukuo government had issued the Manchurian Industrial Development Five-year Plan, designating the coal industry as a major area for development (p. 175). The intensification of production met with a shortage of skilled labour and equipment. In turn, these shortages contributed to the deterioration of safety at the mines in a vicious cycle. By the second five-year plan in 1942, the carbon technocracy had reached its limits through exhaustion and overreach (p. 197). Spraying workers with chemical disinfectants, enforcing quarantine on sick workers and murdering those suspected of illness failed to prevent the outbreak of cholera. From 1943, Fushun failed to meet production targets because of these “unfavorable conditions” (p. 203).

The two and half years the Chinese Nationalist regime controlled Fushun and the subsequent Communist takeover after 1949 replicated the same top-down control of the carbon resources the Japanese empire had enacted. During the war, the Nationalist regime created the National Resources Commission (NRC), which focused on developing coal mines to meet the energy needs of a society at war and of relocated industries (p. 232).

In the 1950s a newly established Chinese Communist regime continued similar patterns of development based on resource extraction established in earlier regimes. On the eve of the Communist takeover, eight Japanese mining engineers and technicians remained at Fushun (p. 265). These men were treated well by the new management at the colliery and received more work points than skilled Chinese workers. They helped Fushun to recover and eventually exceed its pre-war production levels by 1960.

The coal never ran out. But by the 2010s decades of wasteful mining practices at Fushun created geological instabilities that threatened to destroy the entire city. It is hardly a stretch to see in the giant sinkhole about to swallow Fushun a metaphor for humanity in the Anthropocene. Through Fushun, Seow succeeds in demonstrating how the broader global embrace of development based on fossil fuels was built on similar unstable grounds at enormous costs to human lives and the environment.