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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

#331

Post by thomassmith65 »

the_af wrote: post #322
thomassmith65 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What exactly are you advocating? You seem to be going back to Cold War logic. Your initial assertion that people online criticizing the West are "often" criticizing "absurd" things is simultaneously wrong and condescending, some sort of thought-terminating cliché.

Liberal democracy, I suppose.

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

#332

Post by deadbabe »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #254
deadbabe wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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？

I think we should be free to speak whatever language we want in a hackernews comment.

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

#333

Post by simonw »

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…

This was fascinating, and a compelling story. Thanks for sharing it.

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

#334

Post by [deleted] »

jdietrich wrote: post #177
crazygringo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 t…

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by thomassmith65 »

thenthenthen wrote: post #321
thomassmith65 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Short generalised answer; I grew up in Europe. The dominant media was of course Western media, more specifically American media, think Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It is extremely difficult to break out of that bubble.

Well, that's true enough.

I was bracing myself for something edgier.

I don't know what I expected, "China has freer speech than America because Facebook censored antivax content" or something :)

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

#336

Post by seanmcdirmid »

the_af wrote: post #327
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American Gen X, I don’t think very exciting things happened in our youth. We were kind of rich, kind of broke, we had recessions but not upheaval, not hardship, not a society that was more similar to North Korea is today liberalizing at a rapid clip. I could be romanticizing it as an outsider, but I think Chinese Gen Xers have much better stories to tell than we do.

From someone neither from the US nor from China, you sure did your share of weird things too. So I think that yes, you are romanticizing it as an outsider. Almost all of the stories we get told in the West are from the US perspective, so there's that: anything from China feels fresh in comparison.

As an American, the US perspective is pretty dominate in the US. But still, I never went through a protest that ended in a massacre before, I never had to apply for travel permits to leave my town, nor did I need an exit permit to travel abroad. My first trip to China was in 1999 and things were pretty trippy even that late in their development.

The US...what sort of stories do you get told? Are they experiences that Gen X had in general, or just outliers that perhaps were glamorized by Hollywood? Let me tell you, we really didn't have much going on in general.

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

#337

Post by martin-t »

NonHyloMorph wrote: post #175
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…

I have come to that conclusion as well. Curious if there is some political or cultural theorisation efforts out there on this?

I don't know but I don't think so.

The closest I know of is an article exploring why there are is no research into just riots: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/445638/

I follow lesswrong from a distance and they are all about AI takeover but I have seen almost nothing about humans using AI to enslave other humans. And I mean literally almost nothing, I only use "almost" because I remember maybe one post by a person other than me here on HN and that's it.

As for the general trend towards authoritarianism, I see some mentions here and there but I don't think the general population is aware or cares. Usually, most people only start caring when something materially affects them so the typical strategy of divide and conquer ("target minorities first") works quite well.

There might be a small trend of people talking about how wealth works and how the system is stacked against those doing actual work in favor of the owner class: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisKohlerNews and https://www.youtube.com/@GarysEconomics

---

The saddest thing is we (the people) should be learning from countries like nazi Germany or current China and Russia about what not to do, or specifically what not to allow other people to do. But really, general education is shit and history is taught by memorizing names and dates. Plus children don't have enough real world experience to truly understand most of the processes driving historical events and I think most people in general never reach the combination of intelligence and systems thinking to apply any knowledge they might have gained. By all metrics, I am well above average intelligence and even I needed to have a fresh look at history once I started realizing basic principles like "incentives drive behavior".

It's the opposite - they (the rich and connected) are learning from history - what didn't work last time and what to do differently.

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

#338

Post by arjie »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #271
arjie wrote: post #156

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

Thank you!

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

#339

Post by bhuztez »

eunos wrote: post #14
tomcam wrote: post #10

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.

There were programmers already during Cultural Revolution in China?

The Great Cultural Revolution were the Golden Age of PRC. The economy grew rapidly. If you had the Little Red Book, you could take a free train to join the Great Rally held at Beijing.

Hundreds of thousands of micro-computers had been built during that period. For example, there were many used in the textile factories. Workers there were encouraged to learn programming. They wrote programs to control the weaving machines.

After Capitalist Roaders seize the power through a palace coup, they told everybody that, the Great Cultural Revolution wrecked the economy. So most were ditched.

As programmer shortage emeraged in the 1980s, Capitalist Roaders start promoting "grab toddlers to computers".

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

#340

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

the_af wrote: post #323
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ate dinner with this author, our parents know each other.

His story recounts some of your paragraphs word for word, e.g. the execution of the murderer who hacked another man with an axe, right down to the judge uttering the exact same phrase, the same anecdote about using sorghum liquor for the smell, that "the whole Gobi desert smelled of liquor", etc. It's too much coincidence for the two of you to write the exact same things, word for word, all from memory, after so many…

It is no coincidence. In a secluded and tightly-knit community like Plant 404, an extreme event like this would immediately spread throughout the entire area.

The author you mentioned is Li Yang. We know each other, and our parents know each other as well. He published his piece before I did. Since the person involved was his classmate, he was able to provide more first-hand details, such as the part about riding a bicycle to see that boy.

When we had safety education at school, the teachers would still use examples from twenty years ago—like someone getting hit by a car. This is how it was in the plant: once something happened, people would keep talking about it for twenty years.

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