The Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Pennsylvania

For much of the twentieth century, Chinese governments pursued two distinct forms of developmentalism. A “globalist” paradigm emphasized machine technologies, fossil fuels, technocratic knowledge, and capital mobilization, while an “involutionary” approach depended on low-tech, labor-intensive, and cost-minimizing strategies. Both imposed a very high environmental cost, and neither reckoned with the importance of non-human actors such as minerals, soil, water, animals, and microbes. This lecture will explore the dilemmas of development in the early 20th century using the Hanyeping coal and iron mines （汉冶萍公司）as a case study. I will describe how rocks and bugs impeded the state’s pursuit of globalist development in the Hanyeping venture, causing an array of political and diplomatic problems for the late imperial and early Republican regimes. At a methodological level, I will explain why scholars need to take seriously the agency of these kinds of non-human Others even when exploring subjects outside of environmental history.