Quick Link: New Insight Into Why Beijing's Underground City Was Built

A few weeks ago we carried a post by our intrepid writer Anthony Tao, detailing a trip into Beijing's "Underground City," the massive tunnel system dug under China's capital from the late-1960s to house thousands of Beijingers in the event of a nuclear attack. Last week, the UK Telegraph reported on a new series of articles published in China that cast new light on the extreme international tensions that led to Mao’s call to “Dig deep tunnels, store food and prepare for war.”

The Telegraph article states:
“Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat since 1949, wrote that the most serious threat came in 1969 at the height of a bitter border dispute between Moscow and Beijing that left more than one thousand people dead on both sides.
He said Soviet diplomats warned Washington of Moscow's plans ‘to wipe out the Chinese threat and get rid of this modern adventurer,’ with a nuclear strike, asking the US to remain neutral. But, he says, Washington told Moscow the United States would not stand idly by but launch its own nuclear attack against the Soviet Union if it attacked China, loosing nuclear missiles at 130 Soviet cities. The threat worked, he added, and made Moscow think twice, while forcing the two countries to regulate their border dispute at the negotiating table.”

You can read the full Telegraph article here.

It's rumored that the fascinating relic of China’s recent past lying beneath Beijing’s streets will be filled in over the coming months, though it remains unclear whether this will mean the destruction of all the tunnels, or just those around the Nanlougu Xiang area.