Hi HN, OP here.
I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there.
It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code.
This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any questions about life in a Chinese nuclear base!
Thank you for sharing. I have been researching this topic for about ten years now and no first hand accounts like to talk or are they alive anymore, this is a very important story, especially in contrast the the dominant Western narratives, thank you!
Thank you for this profound comment. It is incredibly humbling to hear this from someone who has spent a decade researching the topic.
You are right—the generation that built '404' is aging, and many of their stories are fading into silence. One of my primary motivations for writing this was the realization that if I didn't document these memories now, they might be lost forever.
I hope my first-hand account can provide a more nuanced, human layer to the historical data you've gathered. There is so much more to tell beyond the official records.
As often as not, these days, when someone online criticizes the West, it's for something absurd (eg: Churchill interfering with Hitler's continental invasions, or America using the word 'regime' when discussing Iran). Obviously, other times the criticism is wholly justified.
What "dominant Western narratives" apply here? I'm not going to bicker. I'm just curious.
Not OP, but one example could perhaps be American Prometheus and the Oppenheimer film. I would consider them "dominant Western narratives" about the origin of the nuclear bomb.
And like the person said, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a narrative. Like them I'm also curious about non-western narratives.
If most groups, cultures, religions, countries were more curious about "non-native" stories, maybe we'd all be a bit more open-minded and understanding.
I think Oppenheimer is pretty fair as it goes. It's pretty clear with it being the US perspective and they give credit to the other countries that they have good scientists that will figure the thing out (and they did). I think for exposing a man's experience, it's quite good. What makes me wrong? (An honest invitation to illuminate me)
The last paragraph is true, but up to the point where one becomes a useful idiot for a totalitarian state. I don't mean you, but on social media there are quite a few people like that.
I don't think I'm criticizing Western narratives. This is simply my personal perspective and experience growing up there.
They weren’t accusing you of that, but asking the other commenter what the meant :)
I know! It was a fantastic read. My comment was referring to another comment with an ambiguous reference.
There's no need to be defensive. We are largely westerners on a western website studying history from a western perspective. There's nothing wrong with that, it's natural. It just means we lose some understanding of events if that's the only side we know. OP is performing a service by documenting first-person history, and doesn't need to justify why it's important. It's important.
I'm still curious what specific narratives you had in mind when you said "dominant Western narratives"
To be fair, my father in law who is Chinese and had to exile himself during the cultural revolution would pretty much say the same thing about the Cultural Revolution. Educated people in China who lived through it will certainly criticise the Cultural Revolution (or The Great Leap Forward for that matter) if they are in a situation when they can be honest about it.
So I'm not sure that specific comment would be considered to be a "dominant western narrative" unless you're going to tell me that older (and so who have lived through it) educated people in China who don't speak a word of English have a western mindset because they're educated.
Read Dongping Han
Oh the fact that there has been some positives from the cultural revolution (by having educated people sent to the farm and rural area) doesn't stop the fact that the cultural revolution was a net negative for the country. How many works of arts have been destroyed due to it? How many people suffered? Nothing is ever white or black but it doesn't mean that we can take a small positive outcome and use that to justify atrocities.
The fact that you immediately think you know what the author I referenced has written and continue to plow forward with your pre-established conclusions is evidence of the “dominant western narrative” effect.
Accounts from well-off diaspora of any country will always be negative. It’s a self-selecting group with specific interests.
My comment was asking for details about its parent comment, not about the main post.
I was curious about the 'narratives' it mentioned.
They might be wrongheaded; they might be valid.
Either way, it piques my interest.
> There's no need to be defensive.
This is extremely manipulative. The only reasons to say something like this are to shame the person you're respond to and/or attack and discredit them and force them to respond defensively. Don't do this.
(it also immediately outs you as not having any valid points to make, because someone with a reasonable response doesn't need to stoop to emotional attacks)
It’s a valid question, despite the cynical delivery.
Thanks a lot, I really first thought "404" was just a geek reference and not the actual code name !
I have some very good friends which are Chinese but are not able to read English, do you mind if I do a AI translation, and if you can check it to see if it translate what you're trying to convey ? (I propose that as I think it would be too much to ask to ask to redo the text in Chinese)
Edit: haha I see you actually did the reverse ! Do you mind sharing also the original CHinese script ? That would also help me with my own mandarin learning !
That’s so kind of you!
I did write and publish this story in Chinese first. You don't need an AI translation for them; the original text exists and has been quite popular in the Chinese corner of the internet.You can search for it using the title:《我在404长大》
Thanks. It's interesting to compare the original HN article with the browser-translated story (from https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20240110A03FKJ00).
I definitely appreciate the style of the HN English article, but I think the browser-translated version possibly gives a bit more context to some of the story.
e.g. This is the English version "We would clutch candy wrappers in our hands, giggling endlessly. The teacher would scold us for disturbing the nap, but we Hid behind our parents, still laughing."
This is the browser-translated version: "I kept giggling when I saw her, and she giggled too, and we kept laughing with small sugar paper during our lunch break. When my parents came to pick us up, the teacher criticized us for being undisciplined, and we still hid behind our parents and giggled."
在腾讯新闻找到了，太谢谢你！我准备慢慢看，真有意思！
和目前的版本有一点出入，中文版没有“放射性沙发”这部分。
I do not wish harm to befall you, but is it that because of CCP censors that you removed it from the Chinese version? Did they ask you to remove it or did you do that proactively?
When I first write this in Chinese, they didn't censor anything, just let me published without question.The first guy wrote this been called by phone, they said it's secret, but nothing happened later. Before I published here I add some part, for example, the context of the famine, in Chinese version, people know what I talked about.
Is it just a coincidence that the HTTP code for “not found” became the same as the code name for this city?
I find it hard to imagine otherwise. HTTP codes are based on the server return code system used in FTP, first published in 1971, where each of the three digits had a specific role and the values simply counted up from 0-9 as different meanings were assigned. HTTP is a little looser about the syntax, but it's the same general idea. Given the scheme, something was going to be code 404.
Yes，it's just a coincidence.
Since you mention a trip to Beijing, I wonder what the security precautions were to keep the secret base secret. I assume visitors from other cities would need to apply for a travel permit similar to the one still required for some border areas in Xinjiang and Tibet, but were there also restrictions on people leaving?
That’s a great question. In the early days, physical travel permits were indeed the norm. But the most effective 'security precaution' was psychological.
We had secrecy education (保密教育) starting as early as primary school. We were taught from a very young age that our city didn't exist to the outside world, and we simply didn't talk about it. But when I was a kid ,I didn't know anything about 404.
Given those precautions and your training, was it hard to share about it? Aren't you worried about the Chinese government punishing you for sharing?
He sells a storytelling course... perhaps this is meant to be a 'gotcha' where he reveals the con after the fact? My guess is there are people reading this who know something isn't quite right.
Here's a chinese article about 404 published back in 2020.
https://chaiwanbenpost.net/article/%25E4%25B8%25AD%25E5%259C...
I can personally guarantee that this piece is 100% non-fiction.My course also focuses on narrative writing techniques.Does 'Storytelling' have to imply fiction?In Chinese "story(故事）" just things happened, it can be real or fiction .
There are a lot of subtleties about connotation here. I would say that "storytelling" traditionally primarily meant fiction, but some modern uses also include narrative technique generally, including nonfiction and also marketing. There may also be older traditions of nonfiction storytelling, but that has some connotation of a ritualized or formalized activity (e.g. children sitting in a circle listening to a recitation).
The term that has no connotations of fiction is probably "narrative".
I think many languages have closely related words for fictional narratives and nonfictional narratives.
I don't think that's true. Perhaps in your dialect of English, but if I was down the pub and someone started with, "Did I ever tell you the story of when I...", I certainly wouldn't assume it was fictional.
And how did you know I sold storytelling course before, did I mention it somewhere?
I did write and publish this story in Chinese first.So I hope it's fine.
Was there anything you can recall that 404 maybe had but the rest of China might not have because of its special status? Access to newer consumer technologies, or something like that? Just was curious if there was something “better” about living in a government secret beyond long train rides and melting neighbors.
Exactly. To give you some concrete examples that I’ll dive deeper into in Part 2:
Soviet Architecture: Many of our residential and administrative buildings were designed and built by Soviet experts, giving the city a distinct 'Stalinist empire' aesthetic that felt very grand compared to the surrounding desert.
Elite Salaries: The wage levels in our factory were on par with those in Beijing, which was extraordinary given our remote location.
The 'Post-Scarcity' Bubble: For many families, daily expenses were minimal because the 'unit' (Danwei) provided almost everything. We regularly received rations of high-quality rice, flour, and oil as part of our work benefits, so we rarely had to spend money on basic survival.
In a country that was still struggling with scarcity, living in 404 felt like living in a futuristic, well-provisioned fortress. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I'll talk more about this 'gilded' lifestyle.
Thank you for sharing these memories.
I'd be very interested to hear any thoughts you might have about Jung Chang's book "Wild Swans".
I read this book a year or two ago and learned a lot from it, but I also learned that many people who grew up in China take issue with the author's account. I'd be grateful for any remarks you may be able to share.
You’ve touched on a very sensitive and important point.
It’s true that many people who grew up in China have a complicated relationship with narratives that focus on negative historical periods. There is often a defensive reaction, a feeling that such stories are 'smearing' the country's image.
However, as a writer, I believe that truth is always more important than a curated image. Authentic memories are often scarce, precisely because they are difficult to tell. My goal with the '404' series is to provide a piece of that missing truth—not to judge, but to document a reality that actually existed. In the long run, I believe a society is better served by facing its complex past than by forgetting it.
Hello from Germany, and thanks for the blog post. Fascinating read. I liked how you intertwined the personal point of view with the bigger picture.
"Facing a complex past" is a big theme in Germany, too, of course, and I think it's the only proper way to deal with it. Direct witness accounts and retelling are important and add something that a dry history book can't provide. Keep up the good work!
What are you looking for exactly? And what issues did you hear from others who grew up in China? Most of the historical / political events (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution) are fairly accurate, while personal / family experiences are necessarily subjective. China is a huge, diverse country with a vast range of experiences from people growing up in different regions and eras (just like the US, or Europe), so it's hard to dispute any personal / family experience.
> 404 is a classified code for a nuclear industrial base.
Can you expand? A code under what system? What were some other code numbers and what (unclassified) things did they refer to? Did each code refer to a specific city or specific factory? Or were all cities/factories dedicated to a certain type of industry or military objective classified under the same code? Why did they teach you this code number growing up?
I'm really fascinated by this. Fantastic story overall, can't wait for part 2!
Most things in the Chinese military system are numbered rather than named. Military units are numbered twice - a public cover designator and a private true unit designator, originally four and later five digits. Factories got a three digit number - 296 for the small arms factory in Jiangshe, 816 for the uranium enrichment plant in Fuling and so on. Everyone in and around Factory 404 would have known it as such, but the mere existence of Factory 404 was a state secret.
The existence of such a large and conspicuous secret might seem bizarre to the post-cold-war mind, but it was fairly common in the West too. For example, the British Telecom Tower in central London stands at 189 metres tall and had a revolving restaurant that was open to the public, but was also a designated site under the Official Secrets Act.
These are just numbered designations for many military organizations, just like in the Soviet Union. For example, pre-WWII Plant No.8 -> Artillery Plant 88 -> post-WWII Research Institute 88, nowadays known as TsNIIMash, with Special Design Bureau 88 led by Korolyov (known as RSC Energia today) as a spin-off.
I don't know the code system, for me they are random 3 numbers(like Plant 504 : A uranium enrichment facility.)Thank you liking it, I will post the second part on Monday.
Did you interview Yuan Gongpu or was this part from another source?
I'm interested in the laborers who did the work, not just the scientists who designed everything.
Thanks for your story.
Sorry I didn't，his Chinese name is 原公浦，you can search this and there and many articles about him.
I just wanted to say ‘thank you!’. This was a really interesting read, looking forward to the next part!
Thank you! I will post on Monday.
Please do share it here :)
What would you say to someone who has long been fascinated by nuclear weaponry and hopes to one day witness a test explosion?
I see even China hasn't tested in decades and so my chances of doing this are close to nil, but I ask because your answer could tell more how you feel about the technology and its future. My physics professor told me to study supernovae instead.
To be honest, for me, nuclear explosions only exist in the imagery of propaganda and documentaries. I am not a physicist; I don't understand nuclear physics on a technical level.
My perspective on 'the nuclear' is purely emotional and sensory—I simply find it terrifying. I resonate much more with the raw, human suffering described in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl than I do with the scientific future of nuclear power.
Thanks Vincent for submitting, this is really fascinating.
Thank you! I will post the second part soon.
Stupid question, but is 404 the real designator of that city, or a pun towards the HTTP error code?
Edit: And what a great read, thank you!
Not a stupid question at all! 404 is the real, official designator (Factory 404) established in 1958, long before the web existed.
The coincidence with the HTTP error code is purely accidental, yet incredibly poetic—because for decades, this city literally could not be found on any public map.
I wonder why 404, any relation to 4 being similar to the word "death" in Chinese?
My first guess would be that they at one point decided to use numbers to designate locations instead of names, to make it easier for them to be secret (eg "codenames"). Then at one point someone figured that actually, lets not just thoughtlessly increment the numbers, but pick random numbers between 1-1000 so we add even more confusion. Kind of like Seal Team 6 I guess.
Yes,4 sounds similar to death in Chinese. But 404 was just a coincidence.
Just wanted to say thank you for sharing this view into entirely different world for many of us!
Thank you for the kind words! It’s been an incredible experience sharing this 'different world' with the HN community today.
Well written, and interesting. I'm slightly surprised at the detailed memories you have from such an early age.
Thank you! To me, my childhood memories are imprinted in my mind as vivid images. I'm simply using language to describe the pictures that I still see in my head.
Hi OP, as a side question, are you using an LLM like ChatGPT to translate or write your comments here?
Yes，English is not my first langue, I have to use AI translate for now.
> During the “Three Years of Hardship” (1959–1961), when more than 30 million people across China starved to death, our factory area faced a desperate crisis. At one point, there were only a few days’ worth of rations left in the warehouses, and workers began to suffer from severe edema due to malnutrition.
I was curious about this part and lingering perspectives among Chinese citizens. How do they regard the past mass starvations and deaths in the 1900s? Are these events well known? Are they seen as a catastrophe? Do they blame someone (like the government) or is it seen as the cost of progress or a natural disaster? Do old and young people see these events differently from each other?
Thanks for writing and sharing!
I think it's well known, cause that generation are still alive.In the Northern China, the situation was often more dire because the land is unforgiving. In the South, people at least had the chance to supplement their rations by fishing in the rivers.While the official term often points to 'natural disasters,'it is widely recognized as a man-made catastrophe.
I remember when I was 4 or 5 years old, my mother told me stories about those years. As a child, I didn't understand the historical context; I thought mass starvation was something that happened cyclically, like the seasons. I vividly remember asking her: 'Does this happen every few years? Should we start stockpiling food now just in case?'
Even today, you will see older Chinese people who cannot bear to see a single grain of rice left on a plate. It’s not just frugality; it’s a ghost from 1959.
A common criticism of Chinese people is that they 'eat everything,' but a major reason for this is that China has endured more famines than almost any other nation in human history.
Amazing story, thank you for sharing it
Thank you! I will post the second part on Monday.
Fascinating and well told - many thanks!
Thank you!
Thank you so much for sharing your experience!
Great article, thx for sharing it! What i want to know, where exactly is this city? I mean geographically, i even could not locate it on GMaps or the like?? I mean, i get it, thats the whole point isnt it? Still curious.
Damn, that looks awful, those tailings alone…
And it looks like they have their own dedicated coal powerplant.
Yes，and I feel it's the sweetest home for many years.
40.230000,97.360000
Very interesting, thank you.
In the U.S. we have belatedly had declassification of various parts of military history, including lots of details about Los Alamos (where the U.S. atom bomb was invented). Sometimes this has happened on a delay of many decades and there are certainly still some things that the public might think of as part of "history" that are not officially declassified. Has there been a similar process in China where older military history is no longer officially secret?
See also "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" by Alex Wellerstein.
Amazing, related story. I had a friend that always talked about growning up in 418 Pennsylvania. It began as a company town for a ceramics manufacturer in the 1920s. The factory specialized in heat resistant vessels. You know like kettles, pitchers, industrial teapots. Each stamped each with a model number tied to production lines.
Line 418 was the most profitable. When the post office opened, the clerk assumed “418” was the town name, not the factory line number. By the time anyone noticed, mail was flowing, checks were signed, and no one wanted to correct the federal government. The factory closed in the 1950s. The town shrank but remained oddly proud of its name. Residents leaned into it without explaining it.
Eighty Four, Pennsylvania is home to headquarters of 84 Lumber.
The name origination is however much less interesting but still entertaining
“Eighty Four was originally named Smithville. Due to postal confusion with another town of the same name, its name was changed to "Eighty Four" on July 28, 1884. The origin of the name is uncertain. It has been suggested that the town was named in honor of Grover Cleveland's 1884 election as President of the United States, but that occurred after the town was named. Another possibility is the town's mile marker on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Another is that the town was named after the year the town's post office was built, by a postmaster who "didn't have a whole lot of imagination."
FYI, 418 is the HTTP status code that means the server is a teapot.
Technically a HTTCPCP status code I think?
oddly enough, your post is the only mention and the source of such a town.
edit: 418.. I've been had.
I grew up in 200 Pennsylvania. It was ok.
oh i agree, an OK town. But man 406 PA, was just not acceptable.
Named after the original town in Oklahoma, I presume?
You had me there!! But I've been to a place called "Pie Town" NM which got its name in a similar way, so I figured it could have been true!
There's also Truth or Consequences, NM named after a game show (I believe?)
This is an incredible story! Thank you for sharing the legend of '418'.
It’s fascinating how industrial logic can accidentally become a place's identity, whether it’s a production line in Pennsylvania or a secret code in the Gobi Desert. The fact that residents remained 'oddly proud' of a name that was essentially a clerical error resonates deeply with me.
In 404, our pride was tied to a secret mission; in 418, it was tied to a factory's success. Both show how humans can find a sense of home and belonging in the most 'functional' or even 'accidental' labels. This is exactly the kind of connection I hoped this post would spark.
Unfortunately the comment you're responding to is a joke. HTTP status code 418 is a joke response: "I'm a teapot".
That’s a lot of LLM replies, and counting.
Yeah I was willing to suspend disbelief but that comment kinda did it there.
My sincere apologies to everyone here. You caught me red-handed, and I feel terrible about it.
I promise that the story of 404 is my own, lived experience. Just as the whole article, they are translate by LLM.
I thought 418 was something similar to 404, and made a stupid joke. Sorry again.
Quite funny coincidence with 418 HTTP status code.
Atlanta is frequently referred to as "the 404" due to it being one of our area codes for calling.
April 4th is an informal city holiday, "404 day".
Lots of artists and companies make "404" branded stuff, and you generally see the number all over the city:
https://mondaynightbrewing.com/beer/404-atlanta-lager/
https://sneakernews.com/2025/03/21/adidas-superstar-404-day-...
412 is the area code for Pittsburgh and is all over the place with branding and slogans. Area codes in general are a common signifier within communities and the population. It’s always neat to see locals rep their area codes as advertisement or branding, I like it
Anachronistic though, as area codes don't really mean anything anymore in the era of mobile phones.
Doesn't this happen for lots of area codes? 305 for Miami in particular as Mr. Pitbull likes to remind us.
Yep. 808 is synonymous with Hawaii, since the whole state uses just that area code.
"808 all day" as an example
Absolutely beautiful story thank you so much for sharing.
I don't mind AI translation at all. The style comes off as a bit weird indeed, but I just took it off as a style I'm not used to because it comes from a different culture than mine. I wouldn't mind much the naysayers, I'd like to see them posting something in chinese and see how they'd like it ;)
I really enjoyed the writing style actually, all these different anectodes condensed in shorter sentences, without fluff or trying to connect them in a single narrative. Maybe this is not the correct way to put it, but I'm also not a native English speaker nor I have any classical training in writing.
Yours is the first substack I ever subscribed to and can't wait to read part two. It actually pushed me to start writing some of my childhood experiences.
Thank you again. Absolutely fascinating.
Thank you so much! I hope LLM didn't ruin the vibe, so I edited many times, but still, english is not my first language, so it probably still "looks like AI". I will try my best and I will post part 2 on Monday.
That's such a great use of an LLM! Thanks for sharing!
Unfortunately the ever-present desire for the moneys made folks use LLMs to produce lots and lots of slop, polluting not just the web but even the trust to each other. The default nowadays when reading a piece of text that has even the slightest LLM vibe is to assume it's made-up slop. That's very sad, but necessary, because it's just everywhere.
It's so sad because the tech could really bring people together. Creating almost seemless translations. That's why your work is such a great example for the good this could bring if we'd not have so many greedy people among us.
Thank you so much! I feel LLM is perfect to making web slop, that's really a pity that the smartest thing is doing the worst job.
My grandfather, who is a nuclear scientist, and my mom also come from a small closed-off city in Siberia (Russia).
Visiting my grandparents I remember we had to go through a sort of border control to get there.
My mom told stories of how the government would change the asphalt every year in that city to cover the nuclear dust.
Wow, thank you so much for sharing this. It’s fascinating and deeply moving to see how similar our childhood memories are, despite being thousands of miles apart.
I’m curious how HN’s general warmth toward self promotion is going to be affected by the steady proliferation of AI-assisted content.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong about using AI to help convey your ideas, as long as the ideas being conveyed are 100% genuinely yours. Because then it just becomes a choice of style, and a non-native speaker may not have a better choice of style than "LLMese".
It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism.
The witch-hunt style comments where people accuse an author of using LLMs as if it's some big gotcha that discredits everything they said need to stop. It only derails the discussion.
> It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism.
I think this simplifies the entire discipline of literary criticism and I suppose every other related science. You can write the same prose with both the Bic and the fountain pen; the quality of pen only affects the material quality of the writing—the ink—but not the style (rhetoric? eloquence?) of the writing (i.e., the contents of language, how it’s conveyed, etc.). We aren’t arguing whether it’s appropriate to depreciate writing generated by an LLM to using speech-to-text as opposed to using a keyboard.
The style of the prose does contribute to the value of the artifact and speaks to the repute of the reader in addition. Readers care about what you say and how you say it too.
Nonetheless I as well as others have good reason to interrogate the intrinsic value of LLM-assisted writing especially when it refers to writing like the one being discussed which I reckon qualifies as a part of the “literary non-fiction” genre. So it’s apt that we criticize this writing on those grounds. Many here have even said that they would prefer the 100% genuinely-styled version of the author’s experience which is apparently only 1.5 points lower than whatever their verbal acumen is. [1] Which I imagine places them around the rank of your average American...and I assume so with charity toward the Americans.
While I think some LLM accusations are lazily applied I think communities such as this one benefit from these discussions when waged critically. Especially when status and social capital are of implicit interest.
This seems to be the original story in Chinese, from 2016: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111
Now I’m confused
I posted this in Chinese first.And use AI translated.
Yes，it is.
Something about this feels off. Anyone else?
It's translated. Here's the original:
It feels off to me as well.
It's the kind of unverifiable story that we would like to believe, but there's almost zero way of having independent confirmation. The photos could be from anywhere. The author seems likeable and writes an interesting story, but who knows how much of it is true.
The story seems almost tailored to cater to HN, with secret projects, nuclear power, China, and secrecy.
It is completely plausible, and no details in the story are outlandish for China. Heck, it feels tamer than I would imagine, even.
Agreed. In my opinion, too much strange embodied experience in this engaged and engaging Part 1.
If I told you stories from my childhood as an 10-year old child of an undercover operative in West Germany in 1962-1963 I think many would claim “fiction”. If I did not have my sister as an independent memory backup, even I might have doubts. She was lucky and unlucky and had a big brother.
Part 2 is the harsh part, including death and execution. And now I know how hard life was, but when I was a kid, I just feel 404 is the sweetest home.
I was invited to lunch near factory 541, tank city, a pseudo closed area sprawled in some Shanxi valley. Turned out it was lunch and a show, they were going executing some drug traffickers from strike hard. Impromptu don't do drug lesson from uncle. We had to turn around because I had naturalized western citizenship and weird dialect by then and they figure security would not let us through. It was pretty surreal experience vs how nice and insular danwei life was otherwise.
That makes sense. I’ve heard harsher stories in China.
I lived in west Richland Washington as a kid, my dad worked at Hanford which is a giant nuclear reservation in the western USA. It was mostly typical American kid life, so nothing on your experience, except my dad eventually died of a rare cancer and we got a settlement from the US Department of Energy.
I spent 9 years living in Beijing but first visited in 1999 when thinks were kind of still brutaleski. I’ve had a couple of experiences with the PLA (living in a building where I wasn’t supposed to be living and some off limit areas on the border for foreigners that they don’t tell you about).
Feels AI-ish as well, and OP used em-dashes in some of their replies. But it could be attributed to a language barrier of sorts requiring the use of LLMs to communicate
I use em dashes in prose — and I am not AI.
I'm using AI to translate comments, and it does sounds AI. My IELTS is 7.5, and writing band 6.0, so I have to rely on the tool currently.
Those pictures photoed by me and my parents,I did use LLM to translate, cause my english is not good enough to write a long article.
I apologise. I write too and I've been bothered by LLM-generated content masquerading as the work it takes to tell an effective narrative. It was the combination of generated responses in the comments alongside what I thought was a generated image that set me off, but I was clearly being far too militant.
What's the deal with AI here in the comments?
You caught me! Yes, I am using AI to assist with the translation.
My IELTS score is 7.5, but my writing band is 6.0.
I write my thoughts and comments in Chinese first and then use AI to translate them. The entire article was also translated from my original Chinese manuscript.
谢谢你的文章，太有意思了。这么神秘的故事容易吸引人，万一里面犯了少许语法上的错误，还会有人介意吗？人工智能用起来却可能正事与愿违，让大家质疑你对故事加以过夸张或编造。我建议，第二部不用机器翻译，手动翻译翻译吧。回复人消息，自己写也更好。
Thank you very much for the article, it was super interesting. The mystery in the story draws people in, and people surely won't mind a couple of grammatical mistakes. But you have to watch out: the use of AI makes it easy for people to suspect that the story might've been embellished. For the second part, it might be better to try translating it manually; the same goes for writing replies.
Yes, I will try my best.Thank you.
Your best is more than good enough.
Thank you for sharing your story. It makes the world a better place.
The reply to the 418 joke is clearly generated, not just translated.
The comment with "you touched on an interesting and profound point" is also not a translation of anything a human would write, but AI slop/filler.
Yes it is, really sorry for it. I don't know how to delete it.
It doesn't sound generated to me
I would like to read the original Chinese version as a native speaker. Is there any chance you post that (the article itself) too?
Wow, thanks. I vaguely remembered reading something about this years ago on Zhihu, and I didn't even realize it was the same article!
In the technology industry, many people are not native speakers.
Low-level English is normal and accepted.
On the job, I never speak above the level of a 13-year-old.
AI generated English is hated.
Consider using English, not software translation.
I hate that too, but my english writing is not good enough to write a long article, I edited this many times, I thought it's acceptable.Yes, I will try my best to learn english writing.
Right, you do what you think is best. I'm in no position to tell you what to do. Having said that, it comes off as robotic and impersonal. Personally, I'd rather read you trying to write with your own words what you wanted to write. That is, if you're not AI yourself which there are high chances of and I'm leaning on that theory.
确实，我自己也非常讨厌AI味的文字，很希望我的英文能和中文一样好。只是可能还要好几年时间吧。
Tip, I’d rather read slightly bad grammar due to simple translation than AI assisted interpretation of what you are wanting to say.call me old fashioned I guess
The first version was translated by google and it's wordy, sometimes doesn't make sense, so I used Gemini this time. I sent the first version to many people and no one could finish it ;)
Why? Would a incorrect but literal translation be closer or further from what the author is trying to communicate?
I've been seeing this take on HN a lot recently, but when it comes to translation current AI is far, far superior to what we had previously with Google Translate, etc.
If the substack was written in broken English there's no way it would even be appearing on the front page here, even less so if it was written in Chinese.
An incorrect but more authentic translation would seem more real, like an human earnestly trying to tell a story. We would accept the imperfections and have a subjective feeling of more authenticity.
Of course, even this can be faked, sadly.
When the translation differs so much from what the author is trying to say in their native language, it loses its earnestness.
That's why translation is a job in the first place and you don't see publishers running whole books through Google translate. No one, least the authors, would accept that.
We don't know how much the imperfect translation would differ from the author’s intent, but we would sure try to meet him halfway. Nobody would criticize his broken English.
Contrast this with the faux polite, irritating tone of the AI, complete with fabrications and phrases the author didn't even intend to write.
Authenticity has value. AI speech is anything but authentic.
I mean, you're making assumptions about the author's intent going one way, but not the other. What if the polite tone is what they intended? And how do you know they didn't review the output for phrasing and fabrications?
The author acknowledged they used AI to translate. Is the translation they decided to publish among the given tools they had available to them not by definition the most authentic and intentional piece that exists?
All of this aside, how do you think tools like Google Translate even work? Language isn't a lookup table with a 1:1 mapping. Even these other translation tools that are being suggested still incorporate AI. Should the author manually look up words in dictionaries and translate word by word, when dictionaries themselves are notoriously politicized and policed, too?
I'd rather read something in "bad English" than laundered through generative artificial intelligence tools.
Highly doubt this. Have you read a translated book? Are you looking for literal translations or a translation from someone who's an expert in both languages and makes subjective adjustments based on their experience?
In my new domain, photography, the most common "advice" for beginners is to learn the exposure triangle, shoot manual and get everything done in camera. This kind of advice comes from beginners, quite close to take a fall from the Dunning-Kruger scale. I'm working towards a distinction from one of the most respected photography organizations in the world and nobody involved with it that gave me guidance ever asked how I took the images.
Maybe or, most likely this is the same for writing: there are people that think correct grammar and punctuation and no help on achieving this, means writing.
No, I agree with the other commenter. I'd rather read broken English than the fake tone AI injects on everything (and the suspicion of fabrications, too).
Write your comments in Chinese, we will use our own translation.
Sounds good.我会试着用中文回复，只是不知道在HN上面这样接受度高么？
你可以把中文版发到网上吧
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111 这里是原版的，我稍微修改了一些部分。
You're not just translating though
Please use actual machine translation systems, not generative AI.
这样确实可以避免AI味儿，但是可能阅读起来会体验很差，我最早就是用machine translation翻译，很多部分变得非常wordy，同时令人费解。
What models are you using? I'm using whatever's built into Firefox 140.6.0esr (some Bergamot derivative, iirc), which gives me:
> This can avoid the taste of AI, but it may be very bad to read, I first used machine translation translation, many parts become very wordy, and at the same time puzzling.
Perfectly clear and comprehensible. It's not fluent English, there are comma splices everywhere, and it translated "machine translation翻译" as "machine translation translation", but I understand it – and I'm confident it's close to what you actually meant to say. I can spot-check with my Chinese-to-English dictionary, and it seems like a slightly-better-than-literal translation. My understanding of your comment:
> This can avoid the smell of AI, but it may be a struggle to read. I originally used a dedicated machine translation system, but many parts became verbose (/ very wordy) and incomprehensible.
Generative models don't solve the 令人费解 problem: they just paper over it. If a machine translation is incomprehensible, that means the model did not understand what you were saying. Generative models are still transformer models: they're not going to magically have greater powers of comprehension than the dedicated translation model does. But they are trained and fine-tuned to pretend that they know what they're talking about. Is it better for information to be conspicuously lost in translation, or silently lost in translation?
Please, be willing to write in your native language, with your own words, and then provide us with either the original text, or a faithful translation of those words. Do you really want future historians to have to figure out which parts of this you wrote yourself, and which parts were invented by the AI model? I suspect that is not the reason you wrote this.
That’s some grade A nonsense.
The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation, the task which arguably these chatbots are the most suited! It’s the task that they’re far the best at, both relative to older translation algorithms (which were also AI), and relative to their capabilities other tasks that they’re being put to. These LLMs are “just” text-to-text transformers! That’s where the name comes from!
“Stop using the best electric power tool, please use the outdated steam powered tool.” is what you’re saying right now.
You’re not even asking for something to be “hand crafted”, you’re just being a luddite.
Heh, it's amazing how people have already forgotten exactly how terrible older ML translation was.
The "terribleness" is a feature. It means I can be confident that the meaning of fluent output corresponds to the meaning of the input: I'm capable of hand-translating any passages the computer can't, but I'm not capable of proof-reading all the translations to spot fluent confabulations.
> The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation
Indeed! And yet, generative AI systems wire it up as a lossy compression / predictive text model, which discreetly confabulates what it doesn't understand. Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation? I'd much rather the model take a best-guess (which might be useful, or might be nonsense, but will at least be conspicuous nonsense) than substitute a different (less-obviously nonsense) meaning entirely.
Bonus: purpose-built translation models are much smaller, can tractably be run on a CPU, and (since they require less data) can be built from corpora whose authors consented to this use. There's no compelling reason to throw an LLM at the problem, introducing multiple ethical issues and generally pissing off your audience, for a worse result.
This is really interesting, from what the first part describes, the design and operation of "factory 404" has a lot in common with similar facilities built in the US and Russia. The US built the Hanford/Richland site in the desert of eastern Washington, and Russia built Mayak/Ozyorsk in an isolated part of the Urals. They're all versions of this project to build a self-contained 'utopia' city in the wilderness, dedicated to secret work on nuclear technology. There's also the same social tension between highly skilled workers, transient unskilled workers, and the military/political leadership. (For anyone interested, Plutopia by Kate Brown is a good read on the subject)
I wonder if this site in the Gobi ended up having the same problems with radioactive contamination from accidents and unethical experiments that Hanford and Mayak had?
To be honest, growing up inside, we lived in a state of 'enforced innocence.' While Hanford and Mayak's histories are now well-documented in the West, 404’s specific records regarding accidents or contamination remain largely classified.I only heard some stories from my parents.
Is the “404: not found” error code actually a humorous reference to China’s secret nuclear city?
After all, HTTP was invented at CERN, a nuclear research institute. Staff there would presumably have been aware of “404” and probably made jokes about the fact that it didn’t exist…
It's a coincidence.It’s defined both a digital void and my childhood home is the kind of irony.
This is a fascinating glimpse into a world most people will never experience. A few questions if you're open to sharing:
1. How did the classification level affect everyday social interactions? Were there topics that were implicitly off-limits even within the city among residents?
2. You mentioned the zoo in the middle of the desert - what drove that decision? Was it purely for morale/quality of life, or were there other factors?
3. Looking back now with perspective, how do you think growing up in such a unique environment shaped your worldview compared to peers who grew up in "normal" Chinese cities?
Also really interested in hearing about the technical side if you're comfortable sharing - what was the general sentiment among the scientists and engineers about their work? Did they talk about it as "nation-building" or was it more pragmatic?
Looking forward to Part 2!
很多人建议我不要用AI翻译，所以我用中文回答，辛苦大家用一下翻译功能。 1.厂区里几乎所有人认识所有人，我爸妈饭桌上的话题就是同事八卦。这样的话整个社会氛围其实有点压抑，只要你做了任何出格的事，很快所有人都会知道。 2.我也觉得建一个动物园简直是疯了，文章第二部分有提到这个。我大伯是负责挑选动物的人，从全国各地运动物过去。可能维护成本太高吧，动物园里的孔雀慢慢没了，变成珍珠鸡，最后只有几只家养母鸡了。 3.可能最大的不同是我非常好奇，对一切都很好奇，至今仍然是这样，对所有事情都想问一下为什么。另外一个很大的影响是，我感觉自己没有根，在世界上飘。文章第二部分有提到，整个厂区搬迁了，我没故乡了。 4.那一代人是真的认为自己在nation-building，不计回报的付出。很多人都是从发达城市调过去的，他们家人很多年都不知道他们在做什么。很奇怪，这可能被认为是最严重的洗脑，但是当他们离开404反倒找不到生活的意义了。
The most shocking thing in this article is learning about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine I didn't know about it, what an unnecessary loss of life in a modern era.
> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment (ending with someones couch being neutralized) makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.
Thats a bit much, isnt it? This was in the early days of their nuclear progress, of course at the time it wasnt going to be a linear, completely efficient and sanitized. Kind of a weird comment, nothing develops perfectly while its development chugs along
It’s a personal emotional experience, nothing weird about it at all. Only weird thing is how you singled it out.
The development programme was haphazard. They got bits and pieces off the Soviets and had to figure the rest out.
Right, but the statement extends to the present state of mind of the writer. They're saying that they currently find the notion that nuclear energy can be clean or the cleanest as absurd based on their childhood in the infancy of the program.
Isnt it currently the consensus that nuclear energy can be one of the more clean energy sources? Because they seem to hold their childhood view that thats crazy
What are the coordinates? Been looking for it around 100km west of jiayuguan but I can't seem to get it right
DMS: 40° 10′ 48.67″ N, 97° 16′ 36.49″ E
Decimal: 40.180185, 97.276804
Geo URI: geo:40.180185,97.276804
https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?language=en¶ms...
Chinese Wikipedia https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%94%98%E8%82%83%E7%9F%BF%E5... has the coordinates. It's a lot closer to 玉门 than to 嘉峪关.
Edit: nevermind
I don't know if those coordinates are correct. They seem to be the exact coordinates of Jiayuguan City [0], but then the article also says that the 404 site is located "100 km west of Jiayuguan City," with living areas later relocated to Jiayuguan. So I think the article authors just put the Jiayuguan coords there.
40°10′49″N 97°16′36″E is not exactly 39°46′24″N 98°17′18″E. Did you maybe copy the wrong coordinates? Anyways, have an OpenStreetMap link https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=11/40.1243/97.3375
You’re right, I think my confusion was that they’re both labeled Kiayukwan in Apple Maps.
My father-in-law worked there as a programmer during the Cultural Revolution. There were always guards on the other side of the (locked) office door. Sometimes they’d shoot at random things to remind the nerds just who was in charge.
When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.
That's exactly why I wanted to write this story. It is surreal to think that while we worry about parking spots today, a generation of brilliant minds was working under the barrel of a gun (sometimes literally, as you described). The tension between the 'Red' (political) and the 'Expert' (technical) was a defining tragedy of that era.
I don't disagree with that, but I want to point out that this is one facet of hedonic adaptation. People will always complain about of what they don't have. For instance, most inmates in inhumane prisons would love to have the life you describe if they could enjoy some degree of freedom as a result.
This is where it gets psychologically complex. I’ve often thought that while happiness often comes from having a clear, defined place in a system, freedom is the terrifying opposite—it’s the absence of those boundaries.
My feelings toward 404 are deeply conflicted. It was a cage, yet for a long time, I desperately wanted to go back. As I explore in Part 2, the most tragic part wasn't the strength of the cage, but its fragility. It vanished almost overnight, and when the 'cage' that gave us our identity and social standing disappeared, many of us lost our sense of meaning entirely.
We were free, but we were also 'lost' in a world that no longer had a place for us.
That sounds similar to what some ex-Soviets relate. The system was bad, but by and large had understandable rules that you could use to your advantage, if you had the right standing. Once that system collapsed, they were left to fend for themselves --so even though they had more freedom, they had less certainty in today and tomorrow. Like a 13 year old suddenly becoming an orphan.
> most inmates in inhumane prisons would love to have the life you describe if they could enjoy some degree of freedom as a result.
On the other hand, people (generally) get sent to prison for committing a crime, not for being incredibly smart or talented.
“inhumane prisons” is as redundant as “ink pen”
Not every implementation of "prisons" in the world is about payback or keeping harmful people out of society, some places focuses on rehabilitation, and more often than not, those prisons are not inhumane at all, because that would defeat the very point of the prison.
Maybe if you consider "Can't walk wherever I want" as inhumane, all of them are, but there is definitely a difference between a prison in Rwanda vs one in Norway, and probably one would feel humane after observing the other.
There are plenty of humane prisons out there.
not in america but yea…
Even in america
name one
"Club Fed"
Korolev's story comes to mind instantly. Not only his of course.
I already grew up in a middle class family, but I had a fellow intern at FB whose father used to smuggle furs into Soviet Russia. I really loved that juxtaposition. Nothing new under the sun, but knowing him personally it hit me more :)
I once (>20 years ago) had luch with our sales representative in ... was it Malaysia or the Philippines? In his custom made blue suit, he told me in perfect Oxford English how his grand father had to kill several fighters from enemy villages in order to be allowed to marry his grand mother...
I don't know how exagerated that was, but yes sometimes things go fast:)
I think that’s the beauty of storytelling—it turns 'nothing new under the sun' into something deeply personal and hit us differently.Thank you for sharing that connection， it makes the world feel a lot smaller.
There were programmers already during Cultural Revolution in China?
China made its first computer in 1958 and its first 1 megaflop computer in 1973, so yes, their nascence of computer programming preceded the Cultural Revolution, about 10 years after the West.
It was also a Cold War. My father-in-law and mother-in-law were both gifted mathematicians and mainframe programmers. She also designed CPUs. She is a sweet sweet person and a major badass. She is my hero. She’s in her 80s and was more accomplished in her 20s than you and I put together will ever be.
The so called Cultural Revolution was certainly programming, just not of the computer variety and at massive human cost.
I could believe it, the timespan should be 1966-1976, so maybe in late 70s. I know a lot of automation software was being written in my Eastern European socialist country in assembly language around 1974. I think mostly for 6800-based chips like probably MOS 6502.
While I absolutely agree that in the current state of things most western people are so well off they can't even imagine what it means to actually be oppressed and suffer, I can't help but notice that the current state of things can quickly change and that we're in a constant yet barely visible struggle with forces that want to bring about just that kind of oppression here and that we're slowly losing it.
You might think this is about the rise of fascism[0] in the US, Chat Control in the EU, the failure of revolution in Belarus and Turkey, censorship in the UK, martial law in South Korea, etc. But it's about all of those.
I am reminded that the only real power comes from violence (performed or threatened) and that we keep building cool stuff because we get paid a lot, yet we don't own the product of our work and it is increasingly being used against us. We don't have guns to our heads yet but the goal of AI is to remove what little bargaining power we have by making us economically redundant.
At every point in history, oppressing a group of people required controlling another (smaller but better armed) group of people willing to perform the oppression. And for the first time in history, "thanks" to AI and robotics, this requirement will be lifted.
[0]: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
> I am reminded that the only real power comes from violence
Rather from numbers in my opinion. "Divide and conquer", or its modern equivalent "confuse and manipulate", is what makes violence effective. It is always striking to compare how much people are similar, even in our divided society, versus how much dissimilar they think they are. I'm used to help organize long boat trips with all kind of people from various backgrounds, and it's funny to watch.
In the past it was easy to convince people that "the other" was strange and dangerous, due to physical distance. Today we achieve the same with social media.
> Rather from numbers in my opinion.
Because for now more people means more violence. If you control more people, you control more potential violence. So if your enemy controls more people, you need to either amass more people in your cause or divide the enemy's cause.
And there are limits to how many people you can control. Even in the past, they were surprisingly large to my liking. Helot slaves to their Spartan owners were 7:1 at some point apparently. Soldiers in WW1 had riles and bayonets, yet one guy with a revolver could send dozens of them to their deaths. But still, it was impossible to censor communication among ordinary people and prominent enemies of the regime required constant supervision by another person. Digging up dirt or evidence could take months of work. Now so much communication is online, detecting dissent can be automated to a large extent. There's a limit to how many people can be in prison without starving and without the state collapsing by how many people need to perform useful work and how many people you need to guard them.
But I bet soon we'll see a new dystopian nightmare where prisoners are watched by automated systems 24/7, increasing the prisoner to guard ratio. And finally, look at Ukraine. Artillery was the primary cause of casualties in the past century of wars and you needed people to transport heavy shells, load and fire them. Apparently 1 ton of explosives per death. Now it's drones, which can be mass produced largely automatically and controlled automatically. And they are so precise you could use them to target individuals in crowds.
I have come to that conclusion as well. Curious if there is some political or cultural theorisation efforts out there on this?
It might be, but it's confidential, so I think it's hard to do such things in China.
The Netherlands in 2025 is a decadent country were everyone can do whatever the hell they want.
But a gay man growing up in the 1950s in a rural village was plenty oppressed. It's actually quite fascinating how in the 1960s/70s we had a Cultural Revolution of our own that ended a thousand years of religious oppression! And we didn't even have a Mao.
But never forget we are always one bad week away from sliding backwards.
What is this „Chat Control in the EU“ ?
Whenever people start talking about things called "the rise of fascism in the US" as if its a foregone fact rather than a highly fringe opinion, it's unfortunately rather easy to assume that the person doesn't have a good ability to tell fact from "story they heard online from a web post".
It's fine if you want to argue that there is a rise in fascism in the US, but you need to actually pose that argument, not just talk about it as if its true and that everyone agrees with you.
Also, there is not currently any martial law in South Korea. That was a brief event that lasted a matter of hours from when it was announced and when it was repealed. It's an open question if any actions were actually performed under the guises of it.
The POTUS is calling for his political enemies to be executed. He has sent soldiers - illegally - into “Democrat cities”. He is using what is left of the DOJ to prosecute political enemies. The dismissal rate in the DC circuit is at 20% due to all the baseless vindictive prosecutions. The FCC is cancelling shows critical of the POTUS. SCOTUS is allowing racial profiling. ICE has committed a half dozen high profile cases of political violence against protestors - several in direct violation of a federal judges orders.
But yes, you are its hysterical fringe voices calling this the “rise of fascism in the US”.
There's a web post and a web post.
The source I linked is written by a historian[0] - a guy who actually studied how this kind of stuff happens. You'll also notice that his post uses a fairly high standard of proof - using 2 different definitions of fascism and using only the wannabe-dictator's own statements to show he satisfies all points.
There's also a YouTube video and a YouTube video. Here's an actual lawyer talking about the legality of the proto-dictator's actions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybL-GJov7M
https://whatisfascism.org/docs/Warning_Signs_of_Fascism.pdf
Is any of the boxes not checked?
Were there any birth defects from the radiation? I'm still haunted by a BBC report I saw when I was a kid of residents who lived near some Chinese nuclear test facility and it showed the unbelievable birth defects their children were suffering.
As far as I know, it didn't happen in 404, cause factory area and living area are split. 我们厂区里好像没有，因为生活区和生产区是分开的。
On my trip back from china this week I watched a Chinese movie about their nuclear bomb project. Basically the equivalent of Oppenheimer. Quite interesting movie and now I am reading this
Sounds interesting. What's the title?
Roaring Across the Horizon
Yes, it's really like the small town in Oppenheimer.
404 does sound a bit like a nightmare posting, and God knows what the adults felt like. They probably couldn't say much. But children see things very differently. I forwarded this on to several people.
Thank you for sharing this with others. You’ve hit on the exact emotional core I wanted to explore.
For the adults, 404 was a place of immense pressure, secrecy, and often sacrifice. But for us kids, it was just 'home.' We played in the shadows of giants and nuclear reactors without a second thought.
That contrast—the 'nightmare' for the parents and the 'playground' for the children—is what makes these memories so surreal to look back on. I’m glad that perspective resonated with you.
Incredible account. I love these. If you posted translation would you mind posting the original as well? Great story.
Thank you！Here is the original link https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20240110A03FKJ00
This was a great read. Can't wait for the next installment. Where do you live now?
Thank you! I live in Toronto right now.
Cool post!
Always interesting to read about people's lived realities that are completely different
Thank you! It was indeed a unique place to grow up. I'm planning to publish the next chapter shortly, so stay tuned.
Thank you for sharing your story. Cannot wait for the next part
You are a great writer. Would love to hear what came next and eventually how you found your way to HN. :)
Thank you so much! That means a lot to me.I'll be posting Part 2 very soon on my Substack to continue the story. Hope to see you there!"
More info about similar places:
"Once, a soldier entered the residential area after coming into contact with radioactive material. His hands turned a necrotic black, like charred wood. The authorities didn’t just isolate him; they traced his entire trajectory and burned every single item he had touched. A friend of my father lost his entire sofa because of this. Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me."
"My biggest dream in kindergarten was to be a big brother. I wanted to care for a younger sibling. But under the One-Child Policy, if my mother had another child, she and my dad would lose their jobs. She had to follow the rules and terminate a pregnancy. My wish was impossible."
nice read. interesting experience and great writing. looking forward to the next part.
Thank you! I will post soon.
those jerks put a zoo in the desert!? =(
Yes, next part I will talk about the zoo.I will post on Monday.
>> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.
It's called bad governing. To connect nuclear "not clean" with such bad governing is bit much.
You make a fair point, and from a purely technical or policy perspective, I agree that bad governance shouldn't be conflated with the potential of nuclear technology itself.
However, as a writer, I’m describing the subjective reality of growing up in that environment. When you see 'scorched-earth' measures taken to manage a city, it shapes your visceral perception of that power, regardless of the science behind it. My goal isn't to debate nuclear policy, but to capture how that specific 'bad governing' colored the way we, as residents, perceived the very energy that defined our lives.
This argument that nuclear power generation is clean if you ignore the times when it isn't seems a bit no-true-Scotsman to me. It's a thing I've changed my mind about more than once in the past. What sways my thinking now is:
- most nuclear power does indeed seem to be well run with minimal pollution. - when it goes wrong, the consequences are awful and long-lived (I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted. I suspect there are others that don't have the same cultural resonance for me. - the alternatives in terms of renewables and storage are improving seemingly from one day to the next.
The long term consequences, and human frailty in the face of a requirement for total and eternal vigilance convince me that the risk outweighs the reward. Where nuclear power once seemed [to me. I appreciated that some people have always been anti-nuke] like the least bad option compared with e.g. coal, now there are better ways to make our lives work.
If the endless 50-years-in-the-future ever actually expires and we get practical fusion power, it'll be interesting to see how this changes my thinking. Perhaps that will will have fewer toxic side effects when it goes wrong.
> This argument that nuclear power generation is clean if you ignore the times when it isn't seems a bit no-true-Scotsman to me.
The same can be said about wind and solar. Nothing about producing the rare earths required is clean.
Even if we include Chernobyl, nuclear is still by far the safest source of energy when looking at deaths per TWh generated.
> I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted
Two? I can only count one. Fukushima is almost perfectly safe today, although exclusion zones still exist.
If I set up a wind generator and then leave it with no maintenance it's a risk to an area a little bit bigger than its maximum height. If I leave a nuclear reactor unattended it's a risk to hundreds of thousands of square miles.
I don't know about "bad governing". It sounds more like a rigorous containment policy when nuclear technology was at its infancy in China. (Regulations are written in the blood of your predecessors - https://old.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/ud3lt4/lpt_osh... ). It is also about preventing accident leakage of information and preserving secrecy. For e.g. In the 1970s, India learnt that Pakistan was working to create a nuclear weapon when Indian agents in Pakistan collected hair samples of Pakistan's nuclear scientist, from a barber shop where they got their hair cut - traces of plutonium radiation were found in the hair samples, and Pakistan's nuclear weapons program got exposed.
The LLM flipped from “scorched earth” to “ bad governing” as the sofa faded from its context window.
The metaphor says maybe “extreme cleanliness is like war”, second pass war is bad governing…
Don’t engage with it.
At this point, you’re arguing with an LLM, not a coherent storyteller. The events your question refers to have been downgraded in the context window.
It’s like the game of twenty questions where the LLM doesn’t have a persistent secret object, it’s just simulating consistency.
Precisely.
Especially when comparing the number of deaths(1) from then-China's favourite energy source or simply Uranium's efficiency(2) and the fact we know now how to recycle most of the waste(3)
Sure, I prefer the solar too, but I agree the governance is the bigger problem in the example from the story.
(1) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-so... and https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/10/new-nuclear-power-is-p...
(3) https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
Nice read!
> Our license plates started with “Gan-A,” the same as the provincial capital. We laughed at people from other cities like Jiayuguan (“Gan-B”) or Jiuquan (“Gan-F”). Even as kids, we joked, “We’re still number one.” Because our grandparents were the country’s elite and we lived in the “Nuclear City,” I always felt like I was living at the center of the world.
Am I reading too much into this or does China have a culture of competition which involves mocking those you deem below you even for the most shallow reasons?
Mocking those below you is almost a global phenomena that humans seems to have been doing almost forever, and still do, almost everywhere on the planet. Doesn't really strike me as something uniquely Chinese by any margins.
You can even take it a step farther because animals display the same type of behavior
That’s a very observant question. I wouldn’t say it’s a universal Chinese culture of competition, but rather a reflection of the naive, bubble-like pride we had as children in that specific environment.
We genuinely believed we were special because of the city's status, even if that pride was based on something as shallow as a license plate. It was our way of making sense of our 'elite' isolation. The irony is that this unrealistic sense of superiority made the eventual loss of our home even more disorienting. When the world you thought was the 'center' disappears, you're left feeling completely lost.
You are reading too much into this.
It would be like someone writing an article about growing up in a town with a winning sports team, joking with others about those living in towns with losing sports teams.
Imagine someone reading that and commenting, “…am I reading too much into this or does America have a culture of competition which involves mocking those you deem below you even for the most shallow reasons?”
In my school in Europe we had 4 classes for each grade. A, B, C and D. Guess who felt they were better than everybody else?
Same in Brazil, but I think everyone thought their classes were superior regardless of their letter! Obviously B is the best btw ;)
mine too, but none was such a dick. also, anything related to school (particularly at a young age), is not viewed as something to boast of (at least in my experience in italy, serbia and portugal).
Who?
What comes before A?
Do you really not think this happens outside China?
I’ve lived in the US and Australia. Both have the exact same phenomenon.
> I was born in 1991, thirty years after China’s first atomic bomb explosion, and right around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
I smell cooked