Like many children in 1990s China, every day when the bell rang for recess, my friends and I would rush out of the classroom and onto the playground. Our favorite activity was tiao pijin, a form of jump rope using elastic. It was a team sport. Two of us secured the elastic on either end so it formed a long loop, and the rest hopped in and out of it. To keep up the pace and count our steps, we recited a song: “The malan blooms. It’s twenty-one! Two-five-six, two-five-seven, two-eight-two-nine thirty-one!”
The rhyming verse formed an enduring soundtrack of my childhood. What I did not know at the time was how the lyrics could be read to contain a hidden message. Malan, a type of iris, is also the name of China’s only nuclear arms testing base, and 21 was its military unit number. Situated on the northwestern edge of Lop Nur in Xinjiang, it’s named after the eponymous plant common in the arid landscape. The Chinese government formally acknowledged the site in 1987. Since then, the blossoming of the malan has become a euphemism for the Chinese nuclear weapons program, inscribed in military ballads and school plays.
This October 16 marks the 60th anniversary of the testing of the first Chinese nuclear bomb. When my friends and I coiled up our jump ropes and returned to class, we learned inspirational tales about the earliest generation of Chinese nuclear scientists, who left the comfort of home for the northwestern frontier and toiled in anonymity to forge the country’s atomic shield. In the same classrooms and from the same textbooks, we also marveled at our motherland’s vastness and diversity: every inch on the map had been part of China since time immemorial, and the Han majority and all 55 ethnic minorities constituted one big happy family.
My young mind never made the connection between the two sets of lessons or how they might contradict each other, that the western regions had a history before they became a laboratory for weapons, and the borderlands were also homelands for peoples who have been erased from the narrative about national defense. I was nevertheless unsettled by the story of the Chinese bomb. It seemed too simple and triumphant, devoid of moral ambiguity. But I did not know how to question it. I did not even have the words to formulate my doubts.
I majored in physics at university. Portraits and statues of China’s nuclear heroes adorned the campus. After graduation, I moved to the United States to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, home to the world’s first nuclear reactor, constructed in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project. For six years, my office overlooked a sculpture called “Nuclear Energy,” stamping the site where humankind split the atom and learned to harness the power that fuels the stars. Designed by the British artist Henry Moore, who had been a soldier in World War I and experienced the horrors of chemical weapons firsthand, the 12-foot bronze cast features a round dome held aloft by three twisted columns. It resembles a skull, a nucleus in fission, or a mushroom cloud frozen in time. It is not a trophy.
The art historian Anne Wagner has compared the fullness of the dome to the figure of an expecting mother. Both Manhattan Project scientists and people who wrote about the Chinese nuclear program have used metaphors of human progeny to describe the bomb. But among the people impacted by nuclear disasters, especially women, many have expressed fear of falling in love or of giving birth. What kind of fruit might grow out of the poisoned earth?
As a particle physicist, I bear the legacy of the bomb as part of my academic lineage. As a Han Chinese woman living in the U.S., I have watched in agony and shame the intensifying ethnic oppression carried out in my homeland in the name of national unity and rejuvenation—in my name. The deteriorating political conditions in Xinjiang and the rest of China are the latest manifestations in a long history of exploitation and subjugation. They stem from the same toxic roots as the making of the bomb. And as a living being on this planet, I breathe the air and consume the water marred by decades of nuclear explosions: 45 tests conducted by my birth country and over a thousand by my adopted home. I too am a child of the bomb.
In the banner image of the first Chinese nuclear test, the column of smoke and ash fills up the frame. The mushroom cloud appears to burst out of nowhere, occupying a space without history and outside time. The striking visual declares a bold beginning, the dawn of a new age. Yet, to comprehend the true nature of the bomb—not as a protective shield or potential sword against foreign foes, but as a tool of imperial domination and colonial dispossession against the other within—one must shift one’s gaze away from the spectacle of the cloud to what’s left out of the frame, and hear the voices forcibly silenced amidst jingoistic cheers. It means a return to the land where the malan blooms, before the name of the flower was appropriated for violence.
* * *
In Central Eurasia, on the western edge of the Tarim Basin and by the Kuruk Tagh mountains, lay a wide stretch of dry sand and supple marsh, cradled by a salty lake that had drastically shifted its location over time. The “wandering lake” was Lop Nur. For centuries, the region was home to a Turkic-Mongol people known as the Lopliqs. They spoke a distinct language and fostered a rich oral tradition. They built huts out of reed and wove hemp into fabric. Water was limited, so they lived by its rules. For sustenance, the Lopliqs caught fish and gathered plants. They tossed fish bones into the fire and read their fortunes from the markings. As skilled hunters, they trapped otters and waterfowl and killed tigers with poison. Furs were fashioned into clothing and traded with neighboring communities for metals and other goods.
The Qing empire’s western conquest in the mid-18th century forced much of Central Eurasia under Chinese rule. At first, local governance remained mostly autonomous. The Lopliqs were subjects of the Prince of Turpan, a client of the Qing’s. Each year, the Prince collected from Lop Nur pairs of otters and tigers, and offered them as tribute to the Qing emperor. In the late 19th century, a series of uprisings broke out in the western realm and the Qing empire struck back. Han Chinese troops quashed the indigenous rebels, and the imperial court sought to tame the borderland with Chinese settlements, Chinese language education, and other assimilation measures. The Qing designated the Turkic territory an official Chinese province and called it Xinjiang, literally “new frontier.”
As part of the new policies in Xinjiang, Qing authorities incentivized people to move to Lop Nur and establish new agricultural settlements there. Turkic Muslim women who had transgressed by having sex with Chinese men were also banished to the desert farms. Much of the soil in the area was too salinated to sustain planting, but from the perspective of the state, cultivating the land served as a civilizing mission, where a more morally-advanced, agrarian society could be reaped.
The Qing were overthrown in 1911, and the Republic of China founded in its place struggled to hold onto the vast expanse. For the next few decades, indigenous forces, Chinese governors, and neighboring powers, including the newly-established Soviet Union, vied for control over Xinjiang. A nascent national consciousness grew out of the struggles, and the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang began identifying themselves by the name “Uyghur.” After Mao Zedong’s Communists won the Civil War against the Nationalists in 1949, Xinjiang became part of the People’s Republic of China and was renamed the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” six years later. But autonomy, like communism, would remain an elusive promise.
1955 was also the year the Chinese government formally decided to develop nuclear weapons. With Soviet assistance, the original testing site was selected to be in northwestern Gansu province, just outside the city of Dunhuang. The choice was soon vetoed. The location could only support bombs with a yield equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT or less—deemed too small. (The bomb that decimated Hiroshima had a yield of about 15 kilotons.) And, just as importantly, Dunhuang is home to the Mogao Caves, a renowned site of Buddhist worship that dates to the 4th century. The Mogao grottoes were deemed too valuable to be risked in nuclear testing, so the survey team ventured further west, until they reached Lop Nur.
In Chinese accounts, Lop Nur is “the sea of death.” Books and articles repeat a quote describing the place as fearsome and lethal, where “no living creatures can set foot.” The line is attributed to the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin (1865-1952), or simply to a “Western explorer.” It might seem odd to reference a European visitor as the authoritative voice on an ostensibly Chinese domain. Yet, in state-sanctioned narratives about the bomb, Lop Nur is incompatible with life, well before it was chosen as the target site for nukes; hence, as far as the Chinese state was concerned, the only possibility for human presence in the area would be via a Western explorer’s chance encounter with the place.
I cannot locate the sentence in Hedin’s published works on Lop Nur. On the contrary, during his multiple visits to the area at the turn of the 20th century, Hedin spent extensive time with the Lopliqs, once for more than a year, and documented his observations in detail. He also collected ample materials, including local plants and Lopliq artifacts, some of which are on display in museums in his native Sweden.
For chroniclers of the Chinese nuclear project, the people of Lop Nur do not exist. Civilization had ceased in the region for over a millennium since the fall of the primeval Loulan Kingdom, so the narrative goes. Rather than delivering death and destruction, the bomb brought life and injected vitality into the wasteland, bequeathing it with purpose.
In writings and on screen, contemporary accounts of the Chinese bomb make little distinction in geography between the testing site in Lop Nur and other locales, such as the atomic research center in Jinyintan in Qinghai province, the uranium processing plant in Lanzhou, Gansu province, or the missile base in Jiuquan on the Gansu-Inner Mongolian border. The locations were declassified decades ago, but where the places are and what they are really like are less important than how they are perceived. A rich landscape encompassing mountains and grasslands, rivers and lakes is flattened into one moniker and one sight: the Gobi Desert, where sands extend to the horizon. The exoticizing gaze erases local diversity and reinscribes a centuries-old, Han-centric worldview, where the western pass of the Great Wall marked the edge of civilization, beyond which only barbarians dwelled.
Portrayals of the unforgiving environment also serve to accentuate the selfless sacrifice of the nuclear force personnel, who had journeyed far to reach the remote bases. The descriptor “remote” is never neutral; it does not so much measure a physical distance as indicate relations to power. Where the natives find home and bounty, the settlers see desolation and ruin. For the atomic scientists and military leaders, the alien landscape invoked ancient battles between Chinese empires and steppe kingdoms. They were reminded of Han dynasty generals, whose troops had marched into Lop Nur and defeated the Loulan in the 1st century BC. Some scientists recalled Tang-era poems about the Loulan’s demise, composed during the Tang’s western expansion. In these recollections, the Chinese were harassed and invaded by lesser neighbors, but were never the aggressors themselves. The past expeditions were presented as proof of the western realm’s long association with China, legitimizing current Chinese rule.
For builders of the Chinese bomb, the legendary frontier battles fought at the pinnacles of Chinese imperial power were reinterpreted through a visceral, recent memory: the “century of humiliation” the country had suffered since the First Opium War of 1840, when British gunboats tore through China’s southern shores. The lesson learned was that a strong nation needs strong arms. While Mao had dismissed nuclear weapons as a “paper tiger,” and boasted that his troops with only “millet plus rifles” were able to defeat enemies with superior hardware, the chairman also stated that China must have the bomb “if we don’t want to be bullied.” Historical trauma fueled fresh militancy. The ancient borderlands of Lop Nur and the Gobi opened up paths to a new technological frontier. What was once primitive would be blasted into modernity.
* * *
To defend the nation, life is expendable, though some lives are more expendable than others. In 1958, over 9,000 Mongolian and Tibetan herders were forcibly displaced when their hometown in Qinghai was chosen to house the atomic research center. Many were given only a day’s notice to leave. Caught in snowstorms and brutalized by guards, hundreds perished on the way to the resettlements. Prisoners, including former Nationalist soldiers, worked in construction at the testing site in Lop Nur and were assigned to the more strenuous tasks. In central Hunan province, 74 miners lie at a martyrs’ cemetery in the city of Chenzhou. Most of them were in their 20s. The race to excavate enough uranium for the first bomb had cost their lives. A village nearby became known as “widows’ village.”
When Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and plunged the country into a famine, the conditions at the nuclear bases became exceedingly dire. Many fell ill from malnutrition. Some died of starvation and related causes. Elm blossoms became a delicacy and were reserved for the sick. The central government dispatched emergency supplies from across the country. In dramatized retellings of this period, a common theme is how food was prioritized for the defense scientists. Even top officials gave up their meat rations. The tales of altruism and resolve contain a chilling logic: At a time when few in China had access to higher education, the value of a life depended on how easily its labor could be replaced.
In 1963, after an estimated 36 million or more Chinese people had died from the famine, foreign minister Chen Yi told Japanese reporters that even if the Chinese people could not afford trousers, they would still build the bomb. From British Hong Kong, the Chinese-born novelist Jin Yong penned a searing critique. “A government that places military strength first and the people’s wellbeing second is not a good government,” he wrote in Ming Pao, a newspaper he had founded. He went on to question the usefulness of nuclear weapons to Beijing: “Can [the Chinese government] bomb the United States? Or bomb the Soviet Union? When the people with their naked bottoms rise up in revolt, will they each be bombed to death?”
Known for his martial arts fantasies set in the borderlands of imperial China, Jin Yong faced instant, intense backlash for his anti-nuclear commentary from left-leaning peers in Hong Kong, who labeled him a “traitor” and “anti-Chinese.” Undeterred, Jin Yong went on to publish a series of columns opposing the bomb. Writing in October 1964, days after the first Chinese test, he called the weapon “a sin”: “Where is the pride in doing something that harms humanity?”
Jin Yong’s probing words on the purpose of state violence proved painfully prescient. For Mao, the pursuit of nuclear weapons was in line with his apocalyptic vision of revolution. Speaking in 1958 at the start of the Great Leap Forward, Mao called on the Chinese Communist Party to prepare for “major disasters” and “major wars.” Referencing casualties in ancient battles dating to the Han dynasty, which in comparison dwarfed deaths from the two world wars, the chairman mused that even if two thirds of all people on Earth were lost to atomic warfare, it would create conditions “for the total elimination of capitalism and for permanent peace.” Hence, “it is not a bad thing.”
Less than two years after the first Chinese bomb, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, to usher in a new world by destroying the old and to fortify his reign. The highest levels of the government split into factions. Han intellectuals and ethnic minorities were among the most vilified groups. Flames of political fanaticism set even the most secure military bases ablaze. Rebels from the northeastern city of Harbin reached Lop Nur in early 1967 and tried to storm the site. At the research center in Qinghai, over 4,000 staff members, including 90 percent of the senior technical personnel, were persecuted. Dozens took their own lives. Armed conflicts broke out at other nuclear processing plants, causing many casualties.
The Cultural Revolution finally ended with the death of Mao in 1976. During the decade of turmoil, China detonated on average two atomic devices a year, including the first nuclear missile in October 1966 and the first hydrogen bomb in June 1967, at the height of unrest. Official accounts and literary renditions laud these tests as proof of the scientists’ unwavering allegiance despite extreme hardship. What remains unfathomable to me is how these scientists, some of whom were my professors’ professors, could have trusted the reckless state with such destructive power of their own creation. In memoirs and reportage, I looked for traces of conscientious objection or at least ethical dilemma from my scientific forefathers, who might have agreed with Jin Yong. I hoped to find someone like Leo Szilard, who was instrumental in designing the first nuclear reactor in Chicago and later tried to petition President Harry Truman not to use the bomb—68 colleagues signed Szilard’s petition, but it never reached Truman—or like Andrei Sakharov, who grew increasingly disturbed by his work on the Soviet nuclear program and became a commanding voice against the bomb and for democratic freedoms.
The archive would not grant me my wish. I understand history is a fruit of power, and what’s been recorded is never the whole picture. I also realize my wish is no less naive or even selfish than that of my white colleagues, some of whom have insisted without evidence that Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and head of Hitler’s nuclear weapons program, had secretly sabotaged the Nazi bomb. An alternative past would have assuaged our guilt and redeemed an integral part of our intellectual inheritance. But the truth allows for no such absolution. Szilard and Sakharov were the exceptions among their peers.
Every nuclear power has adopted a similar justification: The bomb is not only necessary, it is righteous, so long as it is our bomb. After the first atomic explosion over Lop Nur, the Chinese government proclaimed that the country had been “forced to” develop and test the bomb due to nuclear blackmail from the United States. Since the Korean War, U.S. administrations from Truman to Kennedy had indeed considered using nuclear weapons against China, but Beijing’s self-exculpatory statement also committed the fallacy of a false binary by assigning agency and responsibility only to the other side.
According to China’s government, its bomb was “fundamentally different” from the American bomb: While the latter was a tool of imperialism, the former was developed in solidarity with and as an encouragement to anti-imperialist struggles around the world. Some in the West agreed with Beijing. The French physicist and Nobel laureate J. F. Joliot-Curie was a passionate advocate against nuclear weapons, but he supported the Chinese program. The African American activist and civil rights leader Robert F. Williams also applauded Beijing’s efforts: “with the bomb, China will be respected and will add a powerful voice to those who already plead for justice for black as well as white.” His sentiment was echoed by the poet Amiri Baraka, who wrote in his autobiography: “When the Chinese exploded their first A-bomb I wrote a poem saying, in effect, that time for the colored peoples had rebegun.”
I wonder if “the colored peoples” in Baraka’s vision include the people of Lop Nur. In their noble quest to contest U.S. hegemony, many on the left have nevertheless committed the same errors as the powers they critique, stereotyping a country while overlooking its margins. From Pueblo lands in New Mexico to the Kazakh steppe, from the Algerian Sahara to Pacific atolls, countries across continents and creed have exercised the same colonial logic in conducting nuclear tests. Native bodies are rendered invisible. Native homes are deemed disposable. Both the United States and the Soviet Union utilized prison labor in their nuclear weapons programs. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had promised his nation a socialist utopia, famously pronounced the Pakistani people would “eat grass” in their pursuit of the bomb.
Since the end of World War II, no one has been killed in a nuclear attack by a foreign adversary, but many lives have been forfeited for their country to gain the bomb, and countless more are dying from the ensuing ecological devastation. Mao might have sounded like a madman, and the dedication of the Chinese nuclear scientists might have exceeded reason, but the greater absurdity lies in relying on the bomb for protection, and detonating it to scare off the presumed enemy. Nuclear war is not just a future possibility. It has already happened. Time and again. It has been waged not between countries or ideological rivals, but under the same sovereign, by the metropole against the colonies.
* * *
On December 12, 1985, thousands of Uyghur students in the Xinjiang capital of Ürümchi marched out of their campuses and gathered at the People’s Square downtown. They called for an end to nuclear testing in Lop Nur, and made several additional demands for true autonomous governance in their homeland. The protests soon spread to other cities in Xinjiang and, by the new year, Uyghur students in Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing had taken to the streets as well.
Market reforms and political liberalization in the early 1980s had brought, briefly, a more accommodationist policy in the borderlands. Non-Han students felt empowered to voice their grievances. The government grew apprehensive, its fears aggravated by nationalist movements in Central Asian republics and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. After a series of unrest, the authorities tightened control in Xinjiang, and have since labeled the anti-nuclear demonstrations as “separatist.” But censorship cannot erase nuclear pollution, and rhetoric of national unity cannot restore the land. Another major protest broke out near the base in Lop Nur in 1993, and Uyghur emigres have rallied outside Chinese borders, including in neighboring Kazakhstan, the former testing ground for Soviet nukes that gave up the bomb after gaining independence.
For years, journalists and diasporic voices from Xinjiang have reported heart-wrenching stories of illness and disability in people who lived near the Lop Nur site, their conditions exacerbated by poverty and a lack of medical resources in the region. The authorities were not oblivious to the concerns. By 1990, Chinese journals had published a handful of papers that categorically denied adverse health or environmental impacts from nuclear testing in Xinjiang. But other studies by Chinese scientists contradict those claims. A 1979 paper presented at the inaugural annual conference of the Xinjiang Society for Environmental Sciences noted sharp increases in cancer cases among residents of the Tarim Basin, as well as a prevalence of fatigue, hair loss, and birth defects, possibly due to radiation exposure. A survey conducted from 1983 to 1984 found plutonium contamination in the Milarn region south of Lop Nur was several times higher than those in control regions. More recent measurements of soil and lake sediment samples in nearby areas also show higher levels of radioactive isotopes consistent with lingering impacts from Chinese nuclear testing. Across the border in Kazakhstan, fallout effects from the Lop Nur tests have been detected as well.
In veteran reunion groups, Han Chinese soldiers from the Lop Nur Malan base have shared their own ordeals with cancer and other chronic illnesses, which have afflicted themselves and their children at staggeringly high rates. In 2007, the Chinese government started to issue exclusive benefits to the veterans of Malan and other units involved in nuclear testing. The payments are modest and the implementation has been uneven. Complaints abound. The native residents of Xinjiang, however, have received no such compensation.
The last bomb in Lop Nur was detonated on July 29, 1996, but the chronicles of Xinjiang as a Chinese frontier and nuclear borderland continue. Beyond the spectacular explosions, the logics of empire are embedded in the mundane gears of nuclear energy that span both military and civilian applications, from the mining of uranium to its refinement, from nuclear weapons storage to radioactive waste disposal. The most hazardous facilities and extractive processes are relegated to the periphery, so the core can be powered and protected.
The role of Xinjiang as a critical supplier of raw materials for the Chinese nuclear program dates to the early 1950s, when the government used beryllium and other minerals from the region to repay loans, purchase weapons, and acquire technical assistance from the Soviet Union. By late 1955, survey teams for the bomb project had discovered rich uranium deposits in Xinjiang. As geopolitical tensions eased in the 1980s, Beijing reoriented its nuclear policy to focus more on civilian use while maintaining the arsenal. Labor and minerals from Xinjiang are crucial to this goal. For years, prisoners plodded at a uranium pit in northwestern Yili county near the Kazakh border; the annual death rate among the incarcerated workers was estimated to be between 10 to 20 percent. In the spring of 1989, as student demonstrators congregated in Tiananmen Square and pro-democracy protests blossomed across the country, more than 100 uranium miners conducted a sit-in in Ürümchi to demand better working conditions.
Over the past two decades, China has become the world’s fastest-growing producer of nuclear energy, with scores of reactors and dozens more under construction. China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), successor to the former nuclear ministry, is one of the two largest nuclear power providers in the country, the other being China General Nuclear Power Group, which is headquartered in Guangdong and is also state-owned. In 2016, China’s first kiloton-level uranium mine opened in Yili, Xinjiang under CNNC; additional mines of similar or greater size are under construction in Inner Mongolia. The company boasts the ability to drill 1,500 meters underground for the radioactive ore. And when domestic production falls short of soaring demands, state capital turns overseas. In 2013, more than 600 uranium miners in Niger went on strike. Their employer was CNNC. Five years later, the Chinese firm purchased the stakes from the British-Australian conglomerate Rio Tinto to control the world’s longest-running open-pit uranium mine, located in Namibia.
Beijing has jettisoned its socialist revolutionary mission to embrace the global market, where uranium is not quite the exceptional substance linked to the bomb but a banal commodity that can be priced and traded. The coloniality of nuclear power manifests on a planetary scale to uphold hierarchy and sustain empire. As China ascends the global capitalist order, the country that once aspired to lead anti-colonial struggles from Asia to Africa has been perpetuating the same patterns of domination and exploitation as the Western powers it rails against.
The imperial nature of the Chinese state is not news to the Uyghurs, but dispossession can take new forms. In the country’s capitalist present, the past is also mined for profit. In 2012, Chinese officials announced plans to turn the Malan base into a tourist destination, at a cost of almost one million dollars. A few hours south of the former nuclear test site, a “Lop Nur People Village” has been designated a national 4A-level attraction—the second-highest ranking. Expunged from the record about the bomb, the surviving descendants of the Lopliqs and their homes are put on display in a theme park for Han tourists and a few foreign guests. Members of the indigenous community are presented as specimens from an endangered breed, but there’s little reflection on what has endangered them. If anything, rarity boosts the market value. During the National Day holiday this October, on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and 60 years after the first Chinese bomb, 40,000 tourists visited the Lop Nur People Village over three days, according to the park’s manager, Tian Chunxiang, who is most likely Han Chinese.
* * *
Toward the end of his book Roaring in the East: A True History of Chinese Nuclear Tests, Peng Jichao, who had spent three decades of his military career at the Malan base and became one of its most esteemed chroniclers, writes: “I gave this explosion center, this ruin, a beautiful name—‘cowpox.’ Because of it, humankind is free from smallpox.”
Like many other parts of the world, Xinjiang was once ravaged by smallpox. The Qing empire’s military expeditions and settlements exacerbated the epidemic. Due to their relative isolation, the Lopliqs were especially susceptible to the disease. In 1880, shortly after reconquering Xinjiang, Qing authorities launched a mass vaccination campaign in its new frontier. As Kevin Kind, a historian of Xinjiang at Johns Hopkins University, has shown, the public health endeavor was also an exercise in colonial power that imposed Chinese medicine and displaced indigenous knowledge. The program was rife with abuse, and parents in Lop Nur resisted by petitioning the Prince of Turpan for exemptions for their children.
Smallpox vaccination in Xinjiang continued after the fall of the Qing empire and through the first decade of the new communist regime. The last cases recorded in the region were at the end of the 1950s. I do not know how much of the earlier history was on Peng’s mind when he came up with the metaphor, but the curious paradox it contains—nuclear war is deadly on a global scale like the smallpox epidemic, but our bomb is benign like cowpox—echoes Beijing’s statement that China has developed nuclear weapons only to help eradicate nuclear weapons. In Peng’s analogy, the nation is given a body, where a small patch may be injured and permanently scarred to fortify the whole, but who belongs to this body, who decides, and who has the power to inflict or refuse injury?
Like the Qing empire’s vaccination effort in Xinjiang, the Chinese nuclear program is not just about expelling an external threat: It also works to eliminate internal differences and pacify the unruly margins, and packages this as development and progress. By labeling native land a wasteland before turning it into one with irradiated barrenness, the Chinese state, like every other nuclear power, has used the bomb to carry out a colonial conquest.
One cannot debase the other without debasing the self. The bomb, through the cynical, twisted logic of its creation, has also colonized the minds of its possessors. The explosions tore through the earth and ruptured the moral fabric. The radioactive dust poisoned the air, the water, and the social foundation. With the bomb, we have condemned future generations and imprisoned our collective imagination. We have sacrificed the safety of humanity for the security of the state. Power is exceedingly monopolized by the powerful. Democratic rights are pawned in the pursuit of a greater speed to deliver death. As the world hovers near the edge of nuclear annihilation, and countries continue in a maniacal race for more lethal weaponry, the toxic waste generated in the name of guarding the nation will outlast every single polity on Earth and become the final legacy of our species.
If this is the definition of progress, then it is us, not the peoples we’ve deemed primitive, who need to be civilized. Before the bombs came, before the lakes dried from reservoir constructions upstream and the tigers went extinct, the people of Lop Nur made peace with the land and lived by the rules of the water. They respected the wisdom of the fish and fashioned abundance out of scarcity. They should be teaching us.
Nearly a century ago, the poet Abdukhaliq Uyghur penned verses on white cloth and hung them up on the streets in his native Turpan. For his passionate calls for freedom, the young writer was captured and killed by the forces of the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai, who ruled Xinjiang at the time. Nearly a century later, some of Abdukhaliq Uyghur’s words have been included in the first anthology of Uyghur poetry published in English. The book was edited by Aziz Isa Elkun. Born in Xinjiang in 1970, Elkun “grew up in the center of nuclear test zones of mankind,” as he puts it, with Lop Nur to the east, Soviet Kazakhstan to the West, and Indian and Pakistani bombs in the south. While in high school in 1986, Elkun was detained for making a poster commemorating the anti-nuclear protests the year before. In 1989, he joined the pro-democracy demonstrations from Ürümchi. With a spotty political record and few prospects for employment, he left China in 1999 and eventually settled in the UK.
From his new home in England, Elkun grows a rose garden. He has planted the flowers in honor of his parents. The cemetery where his father is buried was demolished by Chinese authorities in 2018, and Elkun lost touch with his mother around this time, when an estimated one million or more Uyghurs vanished into prison camps. The roses are also dedicated to the forcibly disappeared, as an enduring gesture of hope.
In the anthology Uyghur Poems, Elkun has translated into English one of Abdukhaliq Uyghur’s most iconic verses. Written shortly before his execution, it’s titled “To Bloom”:
My flowers are ready to bloom
Soon I can wear them as a crown
The fire of my love
Is going to engulf my entire soul.
[. . .]
My courageous flower, let’s bloom
All the efforts I made, let them bloom
If I am giving up my life for my beloved
It is because we will one day die anyway.
To live or die
My love, let’s bloom.