• Speaker: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
• Discussants: Jan Ruzicka (Aberystwyth Univeristy) and Cameron Hunter (University of Copenhagen)

After making the decision to build the bomb around, China entered the nuclear club on 16 October 1964, almost six decades ago. For most of that history, China has largely opted not to look back on its nuclear past, with little interest in commemorative events compared to other nuclear weapons states. This started to slowly change in late 1990s, when China shed new public light on a national weapons development program from the 1950s, known as liang dan, yi xing 两弹一星 ‘Two Bombs, One Satellite’. In 1999, at the highest level, it was commemorated through a medal awarded to 23 Chinese scientists that worked on that programme. This paper will investigate that 1999 moment and its significance. It then moves onto the implications of formal commemoration since then. The paper argues it has become a ‘motivational analogy’ in the Xi Jinping era, where the focus on that program has only grown. Curiously, very little else of China’s nuclear history is commemorated in the domestic public domain. The task of this paper is to unpack the motivations behind China’s focus on this program in its nuclear commemoration efforts.  It finds that the Two Bombs, One Satellite program has become a politically safe analogy in China today. As the paper will show, references to this nuclear program are frequent in the national media and among Chinese elites, including Xi Jinping.

If you would like to receive a draft of the paper ahead of the seminar, please email sterre.vanbuuren@sciencespo.fr