Confronting King Coal in China: The State, Capital, and Labor in a Dying Industry

• In Event: 4367 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 2. Economic Sociology

Abstract

China is the king of coal. In 2016, China was the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, and the world’s largest coal-related polluter; over half of the world’s coal was mined in China in from 2014 through 2016. But, coal is a dying industry, especially in China where Beijing is aiming to drastically reduce coal production and consumption by 2020 and extending through 2050. While China is the king of coal, coal is king in North-Central China. Although Beijing hopes to lessen its reliance on coal, local states in China, specifically in Henan and Shanxi, rely to varying degrees on coal for economic viability. When the national state implements policies that are in direct opposition to the economic goals of local states, what are the ways in which the local state interprets and enacts these laws. Using coal as the case, and conducting 10 months of ethnographic field work in the coal producing regions of China, I meld theories of the state, regional political economy, and economic and labor sociologies in order to explain how the state functions with regard to other state agencies, labor, and capital during economic transformation.

Author

• Daniel Zipp, UCLA