China’s Bomb
Open Access DepositedState-Building, Regime Transition, and the Origins of the Chinese Nuclear Weapons Program, 1945–1955
Conventional histories of China’s nuclear weapons program often treat the CCP’s January 1955 decision as its absolute beginning, presenting the bomb as a sudden achievement created from near-total institutional and material emptiness. This thesis challenges that view. It argues that China’s nuclear capability emerged not from a sharp 1949 rupture or a 1955 miracle, but from a longer process of state-building and institutional conversion spanning 1945 to 1955 across the divide between the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, China’s atomic bomb was not simply the product of the CCP after 1949, but the outcome of a broader twentieth-century Chinese pursuit of sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and great-power status.The study traces how the nuclear project moved from administrative conceivability to material feasibility. It shows that the Nationalist government, although unable to achieve substantive weaponization, established important precedents in talent cultivation, uranium exploration, and the early accumulation of scientific and technical assets. After 1949, the PRC regime did not begin from zero
the dual identities of scientists, who linked scientific expertise to state administration, and a strategy of strategic secrecy combined with selective foreign assistance. The 1955 decision, therefore, was less a true beginning than the formal activation of a human, material, and institutional foundation assembled over the previous decade.
rather, it absorbed and reorganized these inheritances through political centralization, administrative restructuring, and the creation of secret parallel management systems that made extreme mobilization possible. Two mechanisms were especially important in this process
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