Abstract
The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 is now recognized as a momentous event in world history, but at the time it did not make the headlines in one of China’s biggest selling and most influential newspapers. The Shanghai Shenbao covered the attack in a short article taken from a Tokyo news agency entitled ‘Formation of B29 planes attacks Hiroshima’ which was published on 8 August. The article reported that the small number of planes that attacked the city had done a great deal of damage and appeared to have used a new kind of bomb, and followed this with news of American air raids on several other Japanese cities. 1 The diary of Zheng Zhenduo, a writer living in Shanghai, confirms that the bombing of Hiroshima was not initially seen as a major event: he makes no references to the atomic bomb or air raids on Japan, whereas news of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria reached him the next day when the local market was thrown into chaos as a result. 2 A few days later the Shenbao printed President Truman’s speech explaining that the US had revealed its new weapon, the atomic bomb, but the Soviet invasion was the headline news. 3 Mao Zedong, in the Communist base in remote north-west China, announced that an atomic bomb cannot decide a war because it is the people’s struggle that matters. 4 In these first few days the atomic bomb was reported but was scarcely seen as a major event, and yet ten years later the government of the People’s Republic of China was depicting atomic energy as the basis for a new age in which food could be manufactured from water and children could travel to the moon. This paper looks at how Chinese people learned about the atomic bomb, how they reacted, and how this process was integrated with the transnational production of Cold War attitudes and changed from apocalyptic fear to scientific fantasy. 5
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