The Guomindang government faced a herculean task from the onset.  Having reunited the erstwhile divided Chinese polity through coercion and compromise, it now confronted the challenge of setting up a strong and stable state.  A robust industrial economy was regarded as a defining feature of such a state, and Guomindang leaders pursued economic development – often spoken of in terms of "reconstruction" (jianshe 建設) – as a central political goal.  As the main source of energy driving this industrialization ideal, coal received much attention from state planners.  This paper examines the relationship between the Guomindang state and the Chinese coal industry from 1928 to 1949, and argues that the interactions between the two reflected and reproduced markedly technocratic impulses.  The case of coal allows us to see with clarity both the expansion of an interventionist state as well as the limits of its efforts to influence socioeconomic outcomes.

A central actor in this story is the Fushun Collieries, owned and operated by the Japanese South Manchuria Railway Company from 1907 to 1945.  Despite being in Manchuria and thus outside formal Guomindang control for most of the period save a few years during the Chinese Civil War, Fushun features prominently in this narrative in three ways.  First, Fushun coal, along with imports from Japan, dominated the coal market in China's industrial center of Shanghai, placing pressures on Chinese producers and inviting action from the Guomindang state.  Next, Fushun, as the largest coal mine in East Asia, served as an expression of industrial modernity for Guomindang planners, who towards the end of the Sino-Japanese War would imagine a postwar China in which the Fushun coal mines and Manchurian industry, more broadly, would be integrated into a revived Chinese economy.  Finally, the chapter explores efforts by Guomindang officials in Fushun itself, as they attempted to retake and run the Fushun coal mines in the midst of the Civil War.  This was to be technocratic thought operationalized on the ground in the management of this important energy enterprise.