Song of Integrity and Righteousness | "What Matter If My Body Be Ground to Dust"

"What Matter If My Body Be Ground to Dust"

■ Han Liang

The evening of October 16, 1964. Lop Nor. The victory banquet celebrating the successful nuclear detonation had just broken up.

General Zhang Aiping, the commander-in-chief, had not relaxed his furrowed brow. He sought out Li Xuge, director of the nuclear test office, his voice carrying a note of lingering unease: "Xuge, I wonder what became of that iron tower?"

"Tomorrow I'll take a helicopter to the hypocenter and have a look from the air…" Li Xuge volunteered.

"No. Too dangerous." Zhang Aiping shook his head. "Right now the nuclear radiation and nuclear contamination at the hypocenter exceed safe levels by tens of millions of times. The harm to the body would be enormous."

Li Xuge pressed his request three times. Zhang Aiping was silent for a long while, and finally agreed, repeatedly urging him to take every precaution to protect himself.

The next day, nuclear dust still drifted over the ruins of the hypocenter. Before they had even reached the inner ring, the needles of the detection instruments had swung to their limits, and the alarm buzzers sounded in fitful, unnerving bursts. Li Xuge pulled on a heavy protective suit, donned a gas mask, and boarded a helicopter with a photographer, flying toward the hypocenter more than sixty kilometers away.

Hovering above the hypocenter, Li Xuge leaned half his body out of the cabin and looked down at the earth below. The towering iron lattice tower had been twisted into a heap of wreckage, toppled and spread across the ground, melted into iron and solidified upon the yellow sand. The helicopter circled for more than ten minutes, completing its observation and photography mission before turning back.

That night, under the vast and desolate stars and moon of the Gobi, Li Xuge's thoughts surged. He took up his brush and wrote the ci-poem "Xijiangyue · The Tower Frame" (《西江月·塔架》): "For the sake of scientific experiment, what matter if my body be ground to dust — when the thunder sounds, let this body turn to ash, to win glory and honor for the nation."

A single ci-poem captures the heroic sacrifice of those who bore aloft the great weapons of a great power. Reflected in its lines is the wholehearted sincerity of a generation of pioneers who advanced toward danger. Those men of resolve who threw themselves into the great cause — had they not long since prepared themselves to face mortal peril, to be ground to dust?

In 1968, the aircraft carrying the renowned mechanician Guo Yonghuai crashed on landing. Guo Yonghuai and his bodyguard Mou Fangdong held each other in a tight embrace amid the flames, shielding to the last the top-secret data in their arms — data they deemed weightier than their own lives.

In 1979, during an air-drop test, a parachute failed to open and a hydrogen bomb fell from altitude directly to the ground without detonating. Deng Jiaxian, brushing aside the restraints of those around him, rushed alone into the restricted zone and carefully examined the fractured warhead casing on the Gobi floor.

What was it that allowed them to face being "ground to dust" with such equanimity?

Poring over historical records, one detail is deeply moving. Many of the scientists and commanders and fighters who participated in the nuclear tests wrote "pledges of resolve" or "last letters" before they set out. The physicist Wang Ganchang assumed the alias "Wang Jing" and concealed his true identity for seventeen years. When asked whether he had considered his personal safety, he said only: "I am willing to give my life to the nation (我愿以身许国)!"

This resolve to "give one's life to the nation (以身许国)" was expressed not only in the unflinching decisions made at moments of life and death, but was also embedded in the quiet perseverance — through long years of willingness to endure loneliness and willingness to sacrifice — that sustained them.

Beneath that heroic sky, the pilot and photographer aboard Li Xuge's helicopter likewise did not flinch in the face of lethal radiation risk. On that barren wasteland, tens of thousands of combat engineers, chemical defense troops, drivers, logistics personnel, and medical workers fought at the edge of danger, defending the dignity of the nation with their youth and their lives.

At the time, a saying circulated widely at the nuclear test base: "Better to live twenty years less than to fail to build the atomic bomb." "Twenty years less" was not merely a figure of speech. Deng Jiaxian's wife, Xu Lüxi, spent more than ten years visiting and investigating, tracking the health of those who had gone deep into the hypocenter. She found that many had been cut short in their lives by radiation exposure, completing their life's journey far too soon. Taking the hand of Li Xuge's wife, Geng Sumi, she said: this generation of theirs gave far, far too much to hold up the spine of our Chinese nation.

Time passes in silence, yet it has transformed every sacrifice into a resounding echo that shakes the heavens and the earth. The solemn vows made on the Gobi have long since settled into the unyielding spiritual character of the Chinese nation. The spiritual core of "what matter if my body be ground to dust" has long since extended from the depths of the desert into a broader expanse of time and space: on the battlefield against the epidemic, in moments of crisis, heroes were again found everywhere; on the rugged mountain roads of the fight against poverty, there were those whose lives were frozen in the act of making their rounds; when floodwaters raged in the fight against floods, there were those who became the levee itself, an unbreakable wall of bronze and iron…

In his later years, Li Xuge was reticent and rarely spoke of himself. The words he said most often to old subordinates who came to visit him were: "Each generation has its own responsibilities; each generation should have its own conduct."

"When the thunder sounds, let this body turn to ash, to win glory and honor for the nation." This was the oath of the previous generation, and it is also the spiritual beacon they have left for our generation.

At the assembly celebrating the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, Chairman Xi profoundly observed: "Our Party upholds and carries forward the spirit of fearlessness in the face of sacrifice and courageous struggle. For the people, the nation, and the country, for ideals and convictions, we have forged ahead through every obstacle and hardship. No matter how powerful the enemy, how arduous the road, or how severe the challenge, we have always been utterly fearless and have never retreated, inspiring the people of the whole nation to advance from victory to victory with a will of steel that stands unmoved however the storms may come."

On the expedition full of glory and dreams, we must still be prepared at every moment to endure the great tests of high winds and surging waves — or even of raging tempests. We must still answer the same proposition: when the Party and the nation have need of us, can we disregard personal gain or loss, and give no thought to life or death? Only by answering with the same wholehearted sincerity and sense of responsibility can we prove worthy of those who once chose to be "ground to dust," and prove worthy of this land they defended with their lives.