October 2024 marked the 60th anniversary of the first Chinese nuclear weapon test. The test site was at Lop Nur in southeastern Xinjiang, where all of China’s nearly 50 nuclear tests were conducted. Xinjiang also is an important source of uranium for China’s nuclear power plants. This presentation examines how the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang became a Chinese frontier and nuclear borderland, including the role of Han-Chinese scientists, and interprets the Chinese nuclear program through a global history of colonial domination and dispossession, connecting Xinjiang’s nuclear status with the current situation in the region.
About the speaker: Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Her work focuses on the history of science in China and US-China relations. Born and raised in China, she received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago and worked on the Large Hadron Collider for over a decade, most recently as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. This presentation draws on the article Where the Malan Blooms: 60 Years After the First Chinese Nuclear Bomb.