XIHAI, China — The 1st Nuclear Weapons Research Center in China Exhibition Hall is not an obvious target for an energy conservation campaign, but the half a dozen employees at one of Qinghai Province's newest museums have decided to do what they can.
Whenever the museum is without patrons, something I figure that happens quite frequently, the electricity in the building is turned off. When a tour bus, or in my case, a language student on an extended May Break arrives, the Tibetan man selling traditional medicine on the bottom floor stops sleeping and flips on a light switch. That's a queue for the two museums on the next floor to do the same.
I suspect the museum spends the vast majority of its day in the darkness. The few tourists to Qinghai Province can choose to visit a 500-year old Tibetan Monastery, the source of the Yellow River, China's largest lake, or a haze-filled industrial town responsible for bringing the world one step closer to a Nuclear Winter.
The nuclear weapons exhibition tells the history of Xihai, which 60 years ago was pastureland for local Tibetans. Then America detonated two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all big countries, China included, felt they needed to develop nuclear weapons. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and other senior officials ordered work to commence on a top-secret program, centered in Qinghai. Scientists, workers, and even local lamas and herders joined the Motherland's march toward an atomic future. Twenty years later, in a field not far from town, they succeeded and China became the world's fifth nuclear power.
It's hard to rectify the excitement of the People's Daily headline from the day of the explosion: "Our China Detonates First Nuclear Weapon!" and the crumbling buildings around Xihai. Most research ended in the late 1980s, when China trimmed military spending and shifted toward a market economy. Nuclear and coal plants, throwing black smoke into the mountain plateau, still operate, but the town is in delcine. People live in decaying Soviet block-style housing, wandering around the small street grid in a daze. This town is a monument to a failing regime, not a triumph of science.
Reflecting on the consequences of building a nuclear weapon at the same time millions of people in the countryside were starving to death is not the exhibition's priority. As far as I could tell, the exhibit's only concession to peace was a People Daily's editorial from 1967, which hopes that the country will never have to use its new super-weapon. Instead Xihai is presented as just another place to pop in, snap a few photographs and then hit up Sichuan restaurant for lunch. The crassest place in town, and one that I think sums up the place, is a propaganda banner near a large Socialist statue to the detonation: "Two Bombs, One Song Came From This Place." Nuclear explosions, Qing Dynasty folk songs, it's all the same here.
After spending a few hours in town, I'm dumbfounded that this is Qinghai's great new tourist hope. I can't see why people would leave China's smog-clogged cities to drive hours and hours into the wilderness, only to stop at a polluted, depressed valley in the middle of nowhere, especially a place which glorifies weapons of mass destruction.
But then again, here I am.
