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

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.

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.

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.

What "dominant Western narratives" apply here? I'm not going to bicker. I'm just curious.

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.

The existence of such a large and conspicuous secret might seem bizarre to the post-cold-war mind, but it was fairly common in the West too. For example, the British Telecom Tower in central London stands at 189 metres tall and had a revolving restaurant that was open to the public, but was also a designated site under the Official Secrets Act.

I did write and publish this story in Chinese first. You don't need an AI translation for them; the original text exists and has been quite popular in the Chinese corner of the internet.You can search for it using the title:《我在404长大》

My perspective on 'the nuclear' is purely emotional and sensory—I simply find it terrifying. I resonate much more with the raw, human suffering described in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl than I do with the scientific future of nuclear power.

I remember when I was 4 or 5 years old, my mother told me stories about those years. As a child, I didn't understand the historical context; I thought mass starvation was something that happened cyclically, like the seasons. I vividly remember asking her: 'Does this happen every few years? Should we start stockpiling food now just in case?'

Even today, you will see older Chinese people who cannot bear to see a single grain of rice left on a plate. It’s not just frugality; it’s a ghost from 1959.

A common criticism of Chinese people is that they 'eat everything,' but a major reason for this is that China has endured more famines than almost any other nation in human history.

I was extra surprised that there's a chain of crepe places called "Atlanta Crazy Crepes" which as far as I can tell are located only in Akihabara in Tokyo and Eastridge Mall in SJ.

Unfortunately the ever-present desire for the moneys made folks use LLMs to produce lots and lots of slop, polluting not just the web but even the trust to each other. The default nowadays when reading a piece of text that has even the slightest LLM vibe is to assume it's made-up slop. That's very sad, but necessary, because it's just everywhere.

It's so sad because the tech could really bring people together. Creating almost seemless translations. That's why your work is such a great example for the good this could bring if we'd not have so many greedy people among us.

So, write your replies in your native language then post them into Google translate, I guarantee it'll sound better and people won't think it's an LLM.

Thank you very much for the article, it was super interesting. The mystery in the story draws people in, and people surely won't mind a couple of grammatical mistakes. But you have to watch out: the use of AI makes it easy for people to suspect that the story might've been embellished. For the second part, it might be better to try translating it manually; the same goes for writing replies.

Low-level English is normal and accepted.

On the job, I never speak above the level of a 13-year-old.

AI generated English is hated.

Consider using English, not software translation.

I think this simplifies the entire discipline of literary criticism and I suppose every other related science. You can write the same prose with both the Bic and the fountain pen; the quality of pen only affects the material quality of the writing—the ink—but not the style (rhetoric? eloquence?) of the writing (i.e., the contents of language, how it’s conveyed, etc.). We aren’t arguing whether it’s appropriate to depreciate writing generated by an LLM to using speech-to-text as opposed to using a keyboard.

The style of the prose does contribute to the value of the artifact and speaks to the repute of the reader in addition. Readers care about what you say and how you say it too.

Nonetheless I as well as others have good reason to interrogate the intrinsic value of LLM-assisted writing especially when it refers to writing like the one being discussed which I reckon qualifies as a part of the “literary non-fiction” genre. So it’s apt that we criticize this writing on those grounds. Many here have even said that they would prefer the 100% genuinely-styled version of the author’s experience which is apparently only 1.5 points lower than whatever their verbal acumen is. [1] Which I imagine places them around the rank of your average American...and I assume so with charity toward the Americans.

While I think some LLM accusations are lazily applied I think communities such as this one benefit from these discussions when waged critically. Especially when status and social capital are of implicit interest.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46411214

I don't know if those coordinates are correct. They seem to be the exact coordinates of Jiayuguan City [0], but then the article also says that the 404 site is located "100 km west of Jiayuguan City," with living areas later relocated to Jiayuguan. So I think the article authors just put the Jiayuguan coords there.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiayuguan_City

I've met several across different disciplines and two (at least) in computer science and networking. When the barriers for travel came down, many studied and worked abroad, I met some in Edinburgh at the end of the 70s who worked in advanced language areas (think the foundations of ML) formal methods, CSP, you-name-it. People like these in networking (I subsequently know and worked with in governance contexts) built and led the chinese academic internet. These people are now senior academics in the Chinese academy of science. They're serious, smart people.

There was also a late 1970s VLSI boom in China. It's why they were so successful in the 80s and 90s outsourcing chip commercialization space.

So to my own knowledge if not "in" the cultural revolution certainly very rapidly afterwards assuming you take its run up into the 70s.

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".

I don't know how exagerated that was, but yes sometimes things go fast:)

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.

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.

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 same can be said about wind and solar. Nothing about producing the rare earths required is clean.

Even if we include Chernobyl, nuclear is still by far the safest source of energy when looking at deaths per TWh generated.

> I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted

Two? I can only count one. Fukushima is almost perfectly safe today, although exclusion zones still exist.

The metaphor says maybe “extreme cleanliness is like war”, second pass war is bad governing…

Don’t engage with it.

At this point, you’re arguing with an LLM, not a coherent storyteller. The events your question refers to have been downgraded in the context window.

It’s like the game of twenty questions where the LLM doesn’t have a persistent secret object, it’s just simulating consistency.

Isnt it currently the consensus that nuclear energy can be one of the more clean energy sources? Because they seem to hold their childhood view that thats crazy