Chinese governments have tried for centuries to predict and manipulate the weather. This paper explores the science and politics of China’s weather control program in the late 1950s–early 1960s. Newly available documents from Stanford University’s Cadre Archive demonstrate that meteorologists and physicists undertook substantial basic research with support from the central government and military. As their country struggled to feed its citizens during the Great Leap Forward, scientists explored methods for promoting rainfall, preventing hail and frost from damaging crops, and tapping the energy of lightning to produce fertilizer. While blaming the misery of collectivization on “natural disasters,” the central government supported weather modification as a vivid demonstration of its technological competence and concern for the citizens. While most other nations have abandoned large-scale, publicly funded weather engineering, China persists in this endeavor. Rain prevention at the 2008 Beijing Olympics is only the most visible recent example. While the effects of weather control are basically local, a greater global concern is the manipulation of the climate. This technology offers a tempting, unproven, and potentially dangerous way to remediate an atmosphere altered by decades of fossil fuel combustion.
