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!
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.
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. 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
It is beyond settled at this point... the whataboutism doesn't help your argument either.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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. 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very interesting, thank you.
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.
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.
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.
You might be misremembering your childhood -- 200 is in Oklahoma.
oh i agree, an OK town. But man 406 PA, was just not acceptable.
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.
Quite funny coincidence with 418 HTTP status code.
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.
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
Yes, it's really like the small town in Oppenheimer.
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.
> 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…
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?
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.
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.
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.
What is this „Chat Control in the EU“ ?
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.
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.
>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.
It is beyond settled at this point... the whataboutism doesn't help your argument either.
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.
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!"
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.
those jerks put a zoo in the desert!? =(
Yes, next part I will talk about the zoo.I will post on Monday.
> 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.
Do you really not think this happens outside China?
I’ve lived in the US and Australia. Both have the exact same phenomenon.
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.
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 ;)
Who?
What comes before A?
nice read. interesting experience and great writing. looking forward to the next part.
Thank you! I will post soon.
Nice read!
>> 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.
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...
(2) https://xkcd.com/1162/
(3) https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
> 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