This book chronicles the history of Chinese miners in one of the largest mines in Northeast Asia from 1900 to 1948, situating this emergent working class at the nexus of industrial capitalism, imperial expansion, and nation-state construction. Coal from Fushun (in present-day Liaoning province) fueled industrial development that enabled the Japanese empire and later rival Chinese regimes to secure their economic, political, and military presence in the region. In turn, the extraction, processing, and distribution of Fushun coal depended on rendering immobile previously mobile migrant workers through coercion, surveillance, and incentives. The loss of mobility for these migrant workers ultimately resulted in their dependence on the mine for their livelihood. Drawing on Chinese and Japanese archival sources, this book investigates the global forces and environmental conditions that shaped the rise of these interdependent yet asymmetrical relations, and illuminates how coal extraction under industrial capitalism subsumed human labor while concurrently reproducing unequal power relations between social groups.
Limin Teh is University Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She has written on the history of race and mining labour, and the history of Chinese labour and its global connections.