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!
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.
And like the person said, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a narrative. Like them I'm also curious about non-western narratives.
If most groups, cultures, religions, countries were more curious about "non-native" stories, maybe we'd all be a bit more open-minded and understanding.
So I'm not sure that specific comment would be considered to be a "dominant western narrative" unless you're going to tell me that older (and so who have lived through it) educated people in China who don't speak a word of English have a western mindset because they're educated.
Accounts from well-off diaspora of any country will always be negative. It’s a self-selecting group with specific interests.
This is extremely manipulative. The only reasons to say something like this are to shame the person you're respond to and/or attack and discredit them and force them to respond defensively. Don't do this.
(it also immediately outs you as not having any valid points to make, because someone with a reasonable response doesn't need to stoop to emotional attacks)
I was curious about the 'narratives' it mentioned.
They might be wrongheaded; they might be valid.
Either way, it piques my interest.
I have some very good friends which are Chinese but are not able to read English, do you mind if I do a AI translation, and if you can check it to see if it translate what you're trying to convey ? (I propose that as I think it would be too much to ask to ask to redo the text in Chinese)
Edit: haha I see you actually did the reverse ! Do you mind sharing also the original CHinese script ? That would also help me with my own mandarin learning !
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》
I definitely appreciate the style of the HN English article, but I think the browser-translated version possibly gives a bit more context to some of the story.
e.g. This is the English version "We would clutch candy wrappers in our hands, giggling endlessly. The teacher would scold us for disturbing the nap, but we Hid behind our parents, still laughing."
This is the browser-translated version: "I kept giggling when I saw her, and she giggled too, and we kept laughing with small sugar paper during our lunch break. When my parents came to pick us up, the teacher criticized us for being undisciplined, and we still hid behind our parents and giggled."
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.
https://chaiwanbenpost.net/article/%25E4%25B8%25AD%25E5%259C...
The term that has no connotations of fiction is probably "narrative".
I think many languages have closely related words for fictional narratives and nonfictional narratives.
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.
I'm interested in the laborers who did the work, not just the scientists who designed everything.
Thanks for your story.
Can you expand? A code under what system? What were some other code numbers and what (unclassified) things did they refer to? Did each code refer to a specific city or specific factory? Or were all cities/factories dedicated to a certain type of industry or military objective classified under the same code? Why did they teach you this code number growing up?
I'm really fascinated by this. Fantastic story overall, can't wait for part 2!
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'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.
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.
I see even China hasn't tested in decades and so my chances of doing this are close to nil, but I ask because your answer could tell more how you feel about the technology and its future. My physics professor told me to study supernovae instead.
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.
Edit: And what a great read, thank you!
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 was curious about this part and lingering perspectives among Chinese citizens. How do they regard the past mass starvations and deaths in the 1900s? Are these events well known? Are they seen as a catastrophe? Do they blame someone (like the government) or is it seen as the cost of progress or a natural disaster? Do old and young people see these events differently from each other?
Thanks for writing and sharing!
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 don't mind AI translation at all. The style comes off as a bit weird indeed, but I just took it off as a style I'm not used to because it comes from a different culture than mine. I wouldn't mind much the naysayers, I'd like to see them posting something in chinese and see how they'd like it ;)
I really enjoyed the writing style actually, all these different anectodes condensed in shorter sentences, without fluff or trying to connect them in a single narrative. Maybe this is not the correct way to put it, but I'm also not a native English speaker nor I have any classical training in writing.
Yours is the first substack I ever subscribed to and can't wait to read part two. It actually pushed me to start writing some of my childhood experiences.
Thank you again. Absolutely fascinating.
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.
The name origination is however much less interesting but still entertaining
“Eighty Four was originally named Smithville. Due to postal confusion with another town of the same name, its name was changed to "Eighty Four" on July 28, 1884. The origin of the name is uncertain. It has been suggested that the town was named in honor of Grover Cleveland's 1884 election as President of the United States, but that occurred after the town was named. Another possibility is the town's mile marker on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Another is that the town was named after the year the town's post office was built, by a postmaster who "didn't have a whole lot of imagination."
edit: 418.. I've been had.
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.
I promise that the story of 404 is my own, lived experience. Just as the whole article, they are translate by LLM.
April 4th is an informal city holiday, "404 day".
Lots of artists and companies make "404" branded stuff, and you generally see the number all over the city:
https://mondaynightbrewing.com/beer/404-atlanta-lager/
https://sneakernews.com/2025/03/21/adidas-superstar-404-day-...
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.
After all, HTTP was invented at CERN, a nuclear research institute. Staff there would presumably have been aware of “404” and probably made jokes about the fact that it didn’t exist…
It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism.
The witch-hunt style comments where people accuse an author of using LLMs as if it's some big gotcha that discredits everything they said need to stop. It only derails the discussion.
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.
I wonder if this site in the Gobi ended up having the same problems with radioactive contamination from accidents and unethical experiments that Hanford and Mayak had?
It's the kind of unverifiable story that we would like to believe, but there's almost zero way of having independent confirmation. The photos could be from anywhere. The author seems likeable and writes an interesting story, but who knows how much of it is true.
The story seems almost tailored to cater to HN, with secret projects, nuclear power, China, and secrecy.
If I told you stories from my childhood as an 10-year old child of an undercover operative in West Germany in 1962-1963 I think many would claim “fiction”. If I did not have my sister as an independent memory backup, even I might have doubts. She was lucky and unlucky and had a big brother.
I lived in west Richland Washington as a kid, my dad worked at Hanford which is a giant nuclear reservation in the western USA. It was mostly typical American kid life, so nothing on your experience, except my dad eventually died of a rare cancer and we got a settlement from the US Department of Energy.
I spent 9 years living in Beijing but first visited in 1999 when thinks were kind of still brutaleski. I’ve had a couple of experiences with the PLA (living in a building where I wasn’t supposed to be living and some off limit areas on the border for foreigners that they don’t tell you about).
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.
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.
Thank you for sharing your story. It makes the world a better place.
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've been seeing this take on HN a lot recently, but when it comes to translation current AI is far, far superior to what we had previously with Google Translate, etc.
If the substack was written in broken English there's no way it would even be appearing on the front page here, even less so if it was written in Chinese.
Of course, even this can be faked, sadly.
That's why translation is a job in the first place and you don't see publishers running whole books through Google translate. No one, least the authors, would accept that.
Contrast this with the faux polite, irritating tone of the AI, complete with fabrications and phrases the author didn't even intend to write.
Authenticity has value. AI speech is anything but authentic.
The author acknowledged they used AI to translate. Is the translation they decided to publish among the given tools they had available to them not by definition the most authentic and intentional piece that exists?
All of this aside, how do you think tools like Google Translate even work? Language isn't a lookup table with a 1:1 mapping. Even these other translation tools that are being suggested still incorporate AI. Should the author manually look up words in dictionaries and translate word by word, when dictionaries themselves are notoriously politicized and policed, too?
Maybe or, most likely this is the same for writing: there are people that think correct grammar and punctuation and no help on achieving this, means writing.
The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation, the task which arguably these chatbots are the most suited! It’s the task that they’re far the best at, both relative to older translation algorithms (which were also AI), and relative to their capabilities other tasks that they’re being put to. These LLMs are “just” text-to-text transformers! That’s where the name comes from!
“Stop using the best electric power tool, please use the outdated steam powered tool.” is what you’re saying right now.
You’re not even asking for something to be “hand crafted”, you’re just being a luddite.
Indeed! And yet, generative AI systems wire it up as a lossy compression / predictive text model, which discreetly confabulates what it doesn't understand. Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation? I'd much rather the model take a best-guess (which might be useful, or might be nonsense, but will at least be conspicuous nonsense) than substitute a different (less-obviously nonsense) meaning entirely.
Bonus: purpose-built translation models are much smaller, can tractably be run on a CPU, and (since they require less data) can be built from corpora whose authors consented to this use. There's no compelling reason to throw an LLM at the problem, introducing multiple ethical issues and generally pissing off your audience, for a worse result.
1. How did the classification level affect everyday social interactions? Were there topics that were implicitly off-limits even within the city among residents?
2. You mentioned the zoo in the middle of the desert - what drove that decision? Was it purely for morale/quality of life, or were there other factors?
3. Looking back now with perspective, how do you think growing up in such a unique environment shaped your worldview compared to peers who grew up in "normal" Chinese cities?
Also really interested in hearing about the technical side if you're comfortable sharing - what was the general sentiment among the scientists and engineers about their work? Did they talk about it as "nation-building" or was it more pragmatic?
Looking forward to Part 2!
Thats a bit much, isnt it? This was in the early days of their nuclear progress, of course at the time it wasnt going to be a linear, completely efficient and sanitized. Kind of a weird comment, nothing develops perfectly while its development chugs along
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
Decimal: 40.180185, 97.276804
Geo URI: geo:40.180185,97.276804
https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?language=en¶ms...
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.
When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.
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.
On the other hand, people (generally) get sent to prison for committing a crime, not for being incredibly smart or talented.
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 don't know how exagerated that was, but yes sometimes things go fast:)
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-...
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.
Because for now more people means more violence. If you control more people, you control more potential violence. So if your enemy controls more people, you need to either amass more people in your cause or divide the enemy's cause.
And there are limits to how many people you can control. Even in the past, they were surprisingly large to my liking. Helot slaves to their Spartan owners were 7:1 at some point apparently. Soldiers in WW1 had riles and bayonets, yet one guy with a revolver could send dozens of them to their deaths. But still, it was impossible to censor communication among ordinary people and prominent enemies of the regime required constant supervision by another person. Digging up dirt or evidence could take months of work. Now so much communication is online, detecting dissent can be automated to a large extent. There's a limit to how many people can be in prison without starving and without the state collapsing by how many people need to perform useful work and how many people you need to guard them.
But I bet soon we'll see a new dystopian nightmare where prisoners are watched by automated systems 24/7, increasing the prisoner to guard ratio. And finally, look at Ukraine. Artillery was the primary cause of casualties in the past century of wars and you needed people to transport heavy shells, load and fire them. Apparently 1 ton of explosives per death. Now it's drones, which can be mass produced largely automatically and controlled automatically. And they are so precise you could use them to target individuals in crowds.
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.
But yes, you are its hysterical fringe voices calling this the “rise of fascism in the US”.
Is any of the boxes not checked?
The source I linked is written by a historian[0] - a guy who actually studied how this kind of stuff happens. You'll also notice that his post uses a fairly high standard of proof - using 2 different definitions of fascism and using only the wannabe-dictator's own statements to show he satisfies all points.
There's also a YouTube video and a YouTube video. Here's an actual lawyer talking about the legality of the proto-dictator's actions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybL-GJov7M
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.
Always interesting to read about people's lived realities that are completely different
It's called bad governing. To connect nuclear "not clean" with such bad governing is bit much.
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.
- 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.
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.
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...
(3) https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
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?
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.
It would be like someone writing an article about growing up in a town with a winning sports team, joking with others about those living in towns with losing sports teams.
Imagine someone reading that and commenting, “…am I reading too much into this or does America have a culture of competition which involves mocking those you deem below you even for the most shallow reasons?”
I’ve lived in the US and Australia. Both have the exact same phenomenon.
I smell cooked