Empires of Coal

Fueling China's Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920

Shellen Xiao Wu

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804794732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

From 1868–1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China.

Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes.

In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.

1

Fueling Industrialization in the Age of Coal

This [modern economic] order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.¹

—Max Weber

In the popular imagination, arid landscapes of smokestacks and air choking with smog have come to symbolize industrialization. The burning of coal releases excess energy in amounts that made possible industrialization but also results in disagreeable billows of smoke and other toxic emissions. Historians and social scientists have long acknowledged the importance of energy sources to the building and maintenance of European empires. Until recently, however, the discussion did not always include China and the rest of Asia.

In his landmark 1966 work, D. K. Fieldhouse identified the one-sided exploitation of natural resources as a crucial aspect of colonial empires.² Over the course of the nineteenth century, fossil fuels replaced wood as the dominant form of energy used in human society. Contemporary observers noted the importance of coal to the vast economic transformations then taking place, as well as its less desirable environmental effects. Historians, economists, and other social scientists followed suit, from Max Weber and Werner Sombart at the start of the twentieth century to John Ulric Nef, Fred Cottrell, Edward Anthony Wrigley, and Rolf Peter Sieferle into the twenty-first.³ Sieferle pioneered the examination of coal’s cultural and economic significance by using the number of complaints about its noxious fumes to track its use in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.⁴

No one liked the side effects of burning coal, but its use transformed labor, productivity, and the world in which we live. Jürgen Osterhammel’s recent history of the nineteenth century described it as the “century of coal.” With industrialization, coal rapidly replaced the millennial dominance of wood, followed in the late nineteenth century by the use of coal-gas and subsequently petroleum.⁵ For Osterhammel, these changes in energy regime underlay the transformation of the modern world.⁶ And so, as Weber eloquently expressed, the modern world was built on the foundations of fossil fuels and its fate sealed until the last ton of coal is burnt. The questions I address in this book are when, where, and how China comes into this modern world order.

The Chinese had long used coal extensively for smelting and heating in the north, but the first modern industrial enterprises in the late nineteenth century created new demand and uses for a familiar fuel. Ferdinand von Richthofen, geology and mining, European empires, German engineers, late Qing industrial enterprises and mining laws—all these elements of this book converged in the late nineteenth century because European science and technology had transformed societies and the ideology of empires. Empire now entailed the control not just of territory but also of the mineral resources essential to industrialization.

In ways similar to European empires and the United States, the Qing adapted to the age of imperialism by reforming their legal code, educational system, and, more fundamentally, their worldview on the exploitation of natural resources. Richthofen, the engineers at Hanyang, and late Qing reformers and writers all emphasized the centrality of coal as the main source of energy for Chinese industrialization. The protagonists in this narrative viewed coal as more than just a commodity. For a number of contemporary commentators, coal served as a rhetorical device and a metaphor for Chinese sovereignty. Before energy was extracted from coal and used to power trains, steamships, and machines, the cultural conception of coal had to change. I focus on this change in discourse rather than the actual workings of coal mines.⁷

In recent years coal has played an important role in the rethinking of China’s historical place in the global economy. Andre Gunder Frank turned the inevitable “rise of the West” into a temporary European ascendance between periods of East Asian economic primacy.⁸ Sinologists R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz reinforced Frank’s conclusions on the macroeconomic level, and their works have tried to wrest the history of Chinese economic development away from comparisons to the “normal” trajectories of Europe.⁹ Pomeranz, in particular, showed in his research that the Chinese economy stayed robust into the nineteenth century, while Chinese living standards remained on par with those of Europe, and he listed coal as one of the critical factors in the European and Asian divergence. In contrast to Britain, he argued, coal supplies in China were not located near large iron sources, nor did remote coal mines have any incentive to increase production because transportation problems prevented them from supplying the fuel needs of large cities.¹⁰ He pointed to geological differences between English and Chinese mines as a further disincentive for Chinese innovation; Chinese coal mines for the most part did not face significant problems with water accumulation requiring the use of mechanical pumps, the initial use for steam engines.

The original Newcomen steam engines were so inefficient that outside of collieries the cost of fuel made their use prohibitively expensive and impractical. Ventilation, rather than ways to remove water as in England, was the chief technical problem in Chinese mines. Pomeranz cited the distance of major coal supplies from the wealthy Yangzi Delta region as a factor in limiting the transmission and advancement of technological expertise.¹¹ Although Pomeranz raised valid points of difference between English and Chinese coal deposits, his arguments on coal have since been largely refuted.¹² As a whole, however, his work broadened the discussion on coal and spurred scholarship incorporating China and the rest of East Asia in a larger debate over globalization and world economic systems.

Since Pomeranz posited the great divergence, Kaoru Sugihara has argued for a qualitative difference between a capital-intensive Western industrialization and an East Asian labor-intensive industrious revolution, which provided an alternative and complementary path of economic development.¹³ Sugihara pointed out that coal was the main source of energy for the Japanese economy until the 1970s, when nuclear power and liquefied natural gas replaced its use in the industrial sector.¹⁴ Japan’s particular resource restraints clearly affected its path of industrialization, and the same was true in China and elsewhere in the modern world. Both China and Japan partook in a global discussion about industrialization. Yet, even as more people have sought to answer questions about how this process took place in East Asia, a significant gap still remains between the economic analysis of divergence and the theoretical underpinnings of colonial and postcolonial studies.¹⁵

Although in the last decade historians have embraced the notion of “regime change,” whether of the political, religious, or the energy variety, to explain the transformative course of modernization, the term itself flattens what was almost certainly a messy and uneven process.¹⁶ Energy itself does not have a history. People made decisions to create the demand for energy, built the infrastructure to deliver it, and wrote laws to regulate the exploitation of the mineral resources that generate energy.¹⁷ What changed in the nineteenth century so that the views of a Prussian aristocrat intersected with that of reform-minded Qing officials? What was the role of imperialism in bringing about a convergence of Western and Chinese views on the use of mineral resources in industrialization? By examining the transformation of coal from mineral to fuel and bringing back human agency to the process of industrialization, this work seeks to close the breach between theory and the historically specific and unique experience of Chinese industrialization.

In the last decades, historians of China have begun to break down the binary constructs of East versus West, colonizer versus colonized, to emphasize the global circulation of trade and culture.¹⁸ Spurred by the influence of postcolonial studies, Prasenjit Duara challenged the ubiquity of the discourse of nation and nationalism, conceived originally under a Eurocentric Hegelian notion of historical progress and applied wholesale to the East Asian context.¹⁹ Duara pointed to the simultaneity of imperial concerns and newly imported ideas of the nation-state in the nineteenth century, placing both on an equal footing in the making of the modern Chinese state.²⁰ A new wave of scholarship at the intersection of postcolonial studies and Sinology has used the concept of globality to examine specific local responses to global events, influences, and trends.²¹

Certainly for the nineteenth century, but also for earlier periods of Chinese history, the outside world served both as a rhetorical point of comparison, as well as an actual source of inspiration. The anguished sense of crisis pervasive in late Qing Chinese writings would be incomprehensible without acknowledging the source of that anguish in the effects of imperialism and the often contradictory responses of late Qing figures to the epistemological conundrum posed by the West, particularly the question of how to fit science into the existing Chinese worldview. Paying attention to the complex ways Chinese and foreign ideas and epistemological frameworks interacted during the late Qing in no way detracts from Chinese agency. Imperialism remains an important part of the discussion because it was an inescapable reality of the late nineteenth-century world.

In recent years “China in the world,” in all its glorious redundancy and ambiguity of meaning, has become a popular catch phrase, emblematic of the headlong race to industrialize and embrace the country’s newfound status as a rising economic and diplomatic superpower.²² Less apparent are the ways in which contemporary usage of the phrase with all its multiple geographical and political connotations originated from late Qing efforts to redefine China’s place against the increasingly hostile and imperialist intent of Western powers. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Qing literatus Wei Yuan (1794–1857) took up the problem of geography to compile a comprehensive vision of the world, placing China into a global context and signifying China’s heady transformation from tianxia or “all under the heavens” to one of many in a global constellation of nations.²³

By the turn of the twentieth century, the prominent reformer, journalist, and intellectual Liang Qichao (1873–1929) linked China to a newly articulated concept of “Asia” as part of a new world geography.²⁴ In Liang’s formulation, “Asia” became more than just a geographical construct. By placing China in Asia, he aligned the world into a dichotomy of social Darwinian struggle—the colonizers and the colonized, East and West, Asians and Westerners—and reinforced the equivocal blessings of “China in the world.” In such uncertain times, the world proved both essential and emphatically antagonistic to the shifting meaning of China itself. By setting my book in the late Qing, I present “China in the world” embedded historically in the specific circumstances of the late nineteenth century with a further nod to the implicit tensions and contradictions of the phrase.

Several decades have intervened since the Cold War–era “impact-response” paradigm of Western scholarship on China, which placed all impetus for change and reform on behalf of an active West against a passive East, came under attack.²⁵ Yet, the sharp critiques of John King Fairbank’s studies of China’s encounter with the West suffered from their own blind spots in glossing over the ways that “impact-response” played off against early twentieth-century Chinese interpretations of their own recent past. Qing officials, merchants, and intellectuals did not passively accept Richthofen’s assessment of China’s coal and mineral potential, nor did they sit idly by as foreign concession hunters ramped up demands for mining rights following the Sino–Japanese War (1894–1895). Chinese mines dating from the Warring States period (475 BCE–221 BCE) already used sophisticated timbering methods.²⁶ Hartwell’s research showed the extensive exploitation and use of coal for heating and metallurgy by the eleventh century.²⁷ Late imperial officials subscribing to a statecraft school of governance also emphasized mining as an important way to foster economic development.²⁸

What changed in the nineteenth century was the perception, put into circulation by Ferdinand von Richthofen and those who followed him in the geological exploration of China, that coal was not only essential for industrialization but also a measure of a country’s standing in the world. The prominence of coal in this late nineteenth-century discussion resulted from a global as well as domestic Chinese discourse on energy. The dramatic cultural and economic changes taking place during the late Qing occurred as countries around the world faced similar issues of how to survey and exploit mineral resources, as well as the need to update their legal structures to accommodate new technologies and the resulting uncertainties in law. To his Chinese readers, Richthofen exposed a dangerous lapse in knowledge critical to industrialization, which left China outside the ranks of civilized states despite the existence of several thousand years of collected indigenous knowledge about rocks, minerals, and mining. Imperialism and the Chinese perception of imperialism shaped the intellectual and political landscape and altered the path of state formation in the twentieth century.

The focus of this work on science and natural resource exploitation, combined with a global outlook, throws new light on several long contested issues in modern Chinese history, including the role of imperialism, the Self-Strengthening Movement from the 1860s to the 1890s, and the Rights Recovery Movement in the 1900s.²⁹ Much of the earlier scholarship on these subjects emphasized railroad rights—the very issue that became the catalyst for the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1911—treating mining rights as a related but secondary concern. This book reorders that priority by acknowledging the simple fact that railroads, steamships, foundri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Fueling Industrialization in the Age of Coal
• 2. Ferdinand von Richthofen and the Geology of Empire
• 3. Lost and Found in Translation: Geology, Mining, and the Search for Wealth and Power
• 4. Engineers as the Agents of Science and Empire, 1886–1914
• 5. Nations, Empires, and Mining Rights, 1895–1911
• 6. Geology in the Age of Imperialism, 1890–1923
• 7. Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List