“Asiatic Modes” of Extraction: Mining Pasts in China and Japan

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Marx and Engels infamously proposed an “Asiatic Mode of Production”—the expropriation of surplus from communal land and labor by a despotic state. How does this reductive view of East Asia change when we reorient our focus from production to extraction and from economic to environmental history?

This panel delves into extraction in its most material form—the mining of metals and minerals—in order to reconsider the relationships between land and labor and between state and society across East Asian history. From prehistoric, to preindustrial, to postwar, it emphasizes the importance of on-the-ground—and under-the-ground—realities by attending to the local complexities in these dialectical processes. In doing so, it exposes the downstream effects of uneven access and earth harm.

First, Joanna Linzer examines environmental change in the iron sand mining communities of early modern Japan, highlighting the local politics behind meeting the archipelago’s growing demand for metal. Next, Hua Rui traces the unlikely legal entanglements in talc mining between Chinese farmers and Japanese capitalists in the early twentieth century back to the collision of tectonic plates in Manchuria. Finally, Sakura Christmas excavates the environmental costs of hybrid cars in the present by charting the development of rare earth mining in Inner Mongolia, across three different regimes.

All told, this panel reveals how the work of extraction has been linked in feedback with the aims of three very different states in East Asia, with far-reaching consequences for economies and environments.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• The Micropolitics of Extraction in the Iron Mining Villages of Early Modern Japan - Joanna Linzer, College of the Holy Cross

• The Deep Entanglement: Geology and Law in the Transnational Talc Economy of Manchuria, 1.95 Ga to 1945 AD - Rui Hua, Boston University

• Inner Mongolia’s Magnetic Mountain: Mining Histories of the Prius - Sakura Christmas, Bowdoin College

Discussant

• Tristan Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology