[That changed in the 1990s, when “Atomic City,” as it is now billed, became a patriotic showpiece, celebrating the scientists and laborers who worked in the harsh, breathtaking conditions on a plateau 11,000 feet above sea level. They built China’s first atomic bomb, detonated in 1964, then its first hydrogen bomb, tested in 1967, and they helped develop missiles to carry the warheads.]
By Chris
Buckley and Adam Wu
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China’s nuclear arsenal
was born in Plant 221, a secret facility on a remote plateau in the country’s northwest. Now
billed as “Atomic City,”
the site celebrates the patriotism of thousands of
scientists and laborers, but dark aspects of its history go
unmentioned. Credit Lam
Yik Fei for The New York Times
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JINYINTAN,
China — Among the yak herds and
Tibetan Buddhism prayer flags dotting the windswept highlands of northwestern
China stand the ruins of a remote, hidden city that vanished from the maps in
1958.
The decaying clusters of workshops, bunkers and
dormitories are remnants of Plant 221, also known as China’s Los Alamos. Here,
on a mountain-high grassland called Jinyintan in Qinghai Province, thousands of
Tibetan and Mongolian herders were expelled to create a secret town where a
nuclear arsenal was built to defend Mao Zedong’s revolution.
“It was totally secret, you needed an entry
pass,” said Pengcuo Zhuoma, 56, a ruddy-faced ethnic Mongolian herder living
next to an abandoned nuclear workshop, whose family once supplied meat and milk
to the scientists. “Your mouth was clamped shut so you couldn’t talk about it.”
That changed in the 1990s, when “Atomic City,”
as it is now billed, became a patriotic showpiece, celebrating the scientists
and laborers who worked in the harsh, breathtaking conditions on a plateau
11,000 feet above sea level. They built China’s first atomic bomb, detonated in
1964, then its first hydrogen bomb, tested in 1967, and they helped develop
missiles to carry the warheads.
Today, veterans of the project proudly speak of
how they helped to forge China’s nuclear shield. A museum, still forbidden to
foreigners, tells visitors that the weapons were made to fend off American and
Soviet aggressors encircling China. A statue of Mao gazes paternally over the
square of the main town, where thousands of people still live.
“At the time, China’s social conditions and
international position were a bit like North Korea now,” said Liao Tianli, a
writer who visits Jinyintan once or twice a year and has interviewed scientists
who worked on the project. “For many people, it was purely in the spirit of
‘I’ll do whatever Chairman Mao tells me to.’ ”
Yet even as the scientists have won recognition
for their work, lifting some of the secrets of Plant 221, other dark parts of
its past remain muffled in official silence and censorship. Building nuclear
weapons here came at a grievous cost, and a few survivors and researchers have
tried to exhume the layers of history unmentioned in the memorials and
displays.
The herders and farmers who were moved for the
project endured starvation, executions and brutal expulsions. Political
paranoia engulfed the project itself, and thousands of scientists and
technicians were persecuted. Some veterans have said that the nuclear workers
were not adequately protected against radiation, or given effective care after
they fell ill from cancer.
“If nobody spoke out, then this episode of
history would still be buried,” said Wei Shijie, 76, a retired physicist who
worked in a detonation and explosives workshop at Plant 221 during the 1960s.
He wrote a lightly fictionalized memoir describing the persecution of workers
there, and he has called for better medical care for retirees from the project.
“Behind the halo of building the two bombs and
launching a satellite, many people made agonizing sacrifices,” Mr. Wei said.
“Much of that sacrifice was unnecessary.”
The beauty of Jinyintan has been celebrated in
song, and in a film from 1953. In warm months, the grasslands burst into
luxuriant green, and Tibetan and Mongolian herders have for centuries guided
yaks and goats over the pastures.
But after 1958, Jinyintan disappeared from
Chinese maps. Scientists and their Soviet advisers, who helped China with its
embryonic atomic program until the two Communist powers’ bitter split in 1959,
chose the site, and thousands of Tibetans and Mongolians who lived here were
the first to be sacrificed for the project.
The Plant 221 museum says those herders moved
voluntarily, helped by the government and rewarded with thousands of sheep. But
the bucolic images are belied by the account of a police officer who
investigated what happened.
Herders in many parts of Qinghai had risen up
against the confiscations of land and livestock that were part of Mao’s
so-called Great Leap Forward. Officials, concerned that the uprising might
threaten the nuclear plant, were gripped by fears of spies and saboteurs.
“It was necessary to resettle for Plant 221,
but the methods used in Jinyintan were utterly barbaric,” said Yin Shusheng,
who investigated the clearances as a police officer in Qinghai in 1963. Mr.
Yin, now 80, said his report was ignored, and he described the brutality he
uncovered in a memoir published in 2012, in a Chinese magazine later brought to
heel by Communist Party officials.
“I wrote about this to sum up lessons from the
past so we don’t commit the same mistakes,” Mr. Yin said in an interview.
He wrote that officials imprisoned about 700
herders around Jinyintan, accusing them of joining counterrevolutionary gangs.
Seventeen died under brutal interrogation. Up to 9,000 herders were expelled in
forced marches, given only a day or so to prepare and allowed to take just a
few yaks per family. Hundreds died on the journey, beaten and abused by guards,
Mr. Yin wrote.
“People were no better than beasts of burden,”
a surviving herder told an ethnic Mongolian researcher who published their
accounts in a small Chinese magazine in 2007. “We weren’t counted as humans.”
The thousands of scientists, technicians and
soldiers who poured into Project 221 knew little about what had preceded them.
At its peak, Plant 221 had 18 workshops, labs and buildings scattered across
220 square miles, and up to 30,000 scientists, workers and guards lived there.
But even as the secret city forged ahead to
build a hydrogen bomb, it was not immune to the political storms tearing China
apart. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to purge and purify his
movement, and the nuclear site — now politically suspect, having been built
with the help of the hated Soviets — erupted in purges, interrogations and
fighting between rival radical factions.
Mr. Wei, the retired physicist, said he watched
as one of Plant 221’s top scientists, Qian Jin, was clubbed by interrogators.
Mr. Qian died a few days later. Officials detained and interrogated about 4,000
workers in the nuclear project, and about 50 were executed, beaten to death or
killed themselves under the relentless accusations, according to Mr. Wei.
Those events go unmentioned in the museum, and
some former officials from the plant have urged Mr. Wei not to dwell on such
tragedies, he said.
But he tells them there is no getting away from
the past.
“I emphasize that we should reflect on it,” Mr.
Wei said. “I still have dreams of 221.”
