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Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

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Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#51

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #49
martin-t wrote: post #39

> 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 cultur…

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?

Who?

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#52

Post by embedding-shape »

cwmoore wrote: post #40
glimshe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“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.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#53

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

NotGMan wrote: post #35

>> 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.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#54

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

swe_dima wrote: post #27

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.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#55

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

mlindner wrote: post #47
martin-t wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 t…

[flagged]

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#56

Post by colinb »

NotGMan wrote: post #35

>> 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.

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.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#58

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

ocfnash wrote: post #22
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

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 ques…

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.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#59

Post by mcphage »

glimshe wrote: post #28
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#60

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

thenthenthen wrote: post #29
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

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 ques…

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.

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