This Week in China’s History: October of 1901
Much has been made recently of the Chinese government’s pledges on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and other ways that China — and other states — are addressing the climate crisis. “Carbon” has become a four-letter word as the world confronts climate change: “Carbon neutral,” “carbon footprint,” “carbon sequestration,” and “carbon offset” are just some of the phrases that would have had little meaning just a few years ago but are now ubiquitous.
The demonization of carbon is of course not directed at pencil leads or diamonds, but fossil fuels. It is no overstatement to say that the entire global economy is based on sources of energy that originated as organic matter in the distant past, transformed during millennia underground, and are now being burned to provide light, heat, and power. In the opening of the weekly Sinica podcast, Kaiser Kuo speaks of “Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift China’s economy onto a post-carbon footing”; so intent are we on finding alternatives to carbon-based forms of fuel that it is hard to remember that not so long ago, finding new sources of fossil fuels was the goal of governments across the planet, and those discoveries could transform national fortunes and international relations.
It was in that context that in October of 1901, General Zēng Qí 增棋 wrote to the emperor requesting permission for the opening of a coal mine in the Manchurian town of Fushun. As historian Victor Seow records in his recent book Carbon Technocracy, General Zeng was supporting two local merchants, Wang Shengyan and Weng Shou, who had approached him about mining in Fushun, partly because the location, near the tomb of Nurhaci, raised concerns that required the approval of Qing officials. By the end of 1901, approvals were given, and excavation at Fushun began.
Wang and Weng had each submitted their plans separately, and began their mining operations in close competition. Workers from the two mines often fought routinely, occupying one another’s property and requiring local officials to restore order. From these modest and awkward beginnings, Fushun would become the largest coal mine in East Asia, the focus of imperial ambitions and national fortunes.
Of course, Fushun was not the first coal mine in China, not by a longshot. Coal was being mined as early as the Warring States period that preceded the Qin founding in 221 BCE. By the Song dynasty, the work of Robert Hartwell has shown, coal was being mined and used for heating as well as iron and even steel production. In the 17th century, Ming encyclopedist Song Yingxing described techniques and processes for mining coal (including the unfortunately mistaken claim that if exhausted mines were filled with earth, the coal within them would grow back!).
This long history notwithstanding, it’s indisputable that the importance of coal transformed with the advent of the industrial revolution. Kenneth Pomeranz’s pathbreaking concept of “the Great Divergence” between the Chinese and European economies postulated that the differences in quality and accessibility of coal in the two regions was crucial to explaining why Europe’s economy surged ahead of China’s in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Although the work of Prasannan Parthasarathi and others has called into question Pomeranz’s evaluation of coal, it is certainly true that coal reserves came to be seen as essential to national prosperity and security as industrialization expanded. Historian Shellen Wu, in her book Empires of Coal, notes how the Qing state in the 1880s began to view coal production — and therefore coal mines — as essential.
Wu’s book focuses on the wave of coal development that emerged in the self-strengthening movement of the mid-19th century. Although individual officials had been promoting the use and development of coal for decades, it was not until then that the black flammable mineral came to be seen as an imperial priority. Wu’s book is part of a movement among historians of China to reassess the success of China’s last empire. Why was it that the Qing managed to survive for so long after the devastating blows of the wars and rebellions of the mid-19th century? For a long while, the answer was often presented as the reluctance of British imperialists to topple the regime that they had brought to heel, rather than confront a new, potentially less malleable replacement.
This scholarly reassessment, as Wu puts it, “has produced a far more nuanced view of the Qing dynasty and placed the Qing’s expansionist agenda in line with the great land empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What we see in these revisions of Qing history is a far more successful empire than has been acknowledged in the earlier historiography and a lasting legacy that in many cases continues into the present day.” Focusing less on the disruptions of revolution and political change, and more on the continuities of development and reform, put the Qing in a more favorable light. The development of extractive industries like coal is one of these lenses.
And the pinnacle of that coal development is Fushun, at the focus of Seow’s work. And it illustrates not only the agency of Qing authorities and subjects, but also the role of imperialists and foreigners. The Fushun region had been a source of coal for centuries, probably millennia, but mining there was banned in the high Qing, when the Qianlong emperor decreed that the mine’s location interfered with the geomancy of the Manchus’ ancestral tombs. Even while coal production became an imperial priority, in the 19th century, mining remained off-limits in the Manchu homeland, prompting Zeng Qi’s 1901 memorial.
Almost as soon as mining operations resumed at Fushun, the region plunged into conflict. Perhaps no symbol of the late-Qing “carving of the melon” is as potent as the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, when the Qing was too weak even to prevent conflict over its territory between two of its predatory neighbors, watching helplessly as both Russia and Japan fought for control over Manchuria. Resources — coal among them — were a primary motivation for the war. Both Russia and Japan occupied the Fushun mine at times during the conflict, but when Japan emerged the victor, its presence would transform mining in Manchuria and beyond.
With its victory in the war, Japan took over the mines at Fushun, though it technically only operated them while the Qing retained ownership. In 1931, when Japanese armies pried Manchuria away from China, the complex “rental” arrangement was unnecessary. Up through the end of World War II, the Fushun mines — there came to be five open pit mines — yielded nearly 230 million tons of coal, powering Manchuria’s industrialization, then at the forefront of East Asian development.
After the founding of the People’s Republic, Fushun was at the forefront of Communist industrial policy. Coal production peaked in 1962 at more than 18 million tons per year. Eventually, the largest mine — the West Open Pit — reached an overwhelming scale: more than four square miles, reaching a depth of 1,000 feet. As the coal deposits began to run out — or the cost of extraction became too great — the mines began to slow. The first of the mines closed in 1976. The largest — West Open-pit — shut down in 2019.
The size, and value, of this production was immense; so too was its cost. Hundreds of thousands of miners have died pulling coal from the Manchurian ground. Excavation has caused the ground itself to become unstable, and sinkholes, landslides, and flooding now threaten to make the region uninhabitable.
In a museum making use of Fushun’s former observation platform from which generations of engineers, politicians, and workers looked with awe on the scale of mining at Fushun, a reproduction of Zeng Qi’s memorial, from 1901, sits along with statues of the “capitalists” who sought to develop Fushun. Opened just before the mine ceased operation, the museum “may have been established to celebrate the industry that made this city,” historian Seow writes, “but its construction also sounded a death knell for coal mining here — a search for remembrance in the midst of ongoing loss.”
Fushun is now trying to reimagine itself into a green, eco-tourism site. As absurd as this seems, one wonders if it is any less ridiculous than the denial or willful ignorance that characterizes much of the planet as we contemplate a post-carbon world.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
