So the government aims to manipulate the citys weather. This is a matter of plain bureaucracy, not science fiction. Ren ding sheng tian, went an old aphorism embraced by Mao Zedong: Man must defeat the heavens. The Peoples Republic has a colorful history of battling nature with colossal, often ill-starred public-works projects. Imperial flood-control schemes, for instance, begat todays Three Gorges Dam, designed to be the worlds largest hydroelectric stationand denounced by critics as an environmental disaster.
The Weather Modification Office (WMO) is an arm of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, which is the local branch of the Chinese Meteorological Administration. There are 31 provincial or municipal weather-modification offices in China. The administration employs 52,998 people by its own count. Beijings WMO has sixteen full-time employees who direct the activities of several dozen part-time weather modifiers, mostly local farmers. The farmers maintain 21 emplacements of antiaircraft guns and 26 rocket launchers, which fire munitions loaded with silver iodide into the clouds. In the winter, when clouds are lower, the modifiers burn chemical charges in special stoves. A small squadron of planes, flown from a military airfield, delivers silver iodide or dry ice into the clouds from above. In the clouds, the silver iodide mingles with tiny droplets of waterleading, in theory, to the formation of ice particles, which melt into heavier drops and then fall as rain.
The operations of the weather modifiers lend themselves to a kind of science folklore. Beijingers and foreigners in the city harbor pet theories about signs that the government may be tampering with a particular days weatherthey include unusually fat raindrops, rain from clear skies, or remarkably well-timed breaks of sunshine. Such divination both over- and underestimates the Beijing Meteorological Bureaus activity. Normally, if conditions permit, yes, we would modify, says Zhang Qiang, the deputy director of theWMO. But miraculous transformations have not been the goalat least until now.
This year, much of Zhangs time is taken up with a new obligation. Beijing is preparing for the coming Summer Olympics with an all-encompassing effort involving new subway lines, trophy architectural projects, and an urban renewal campaign that has cut huge swaths through whats considered the old city. Over it all hovers the problem of the weatherwhich Chinese officials have been manipulating for 50 years nowand what to do about it. The Beijing Games are meant to mark Chinas emergence on the world stage as a 21st-century global superpower. China would like that stage to be clean and dry.
The Olympics will take place during the brief but emphatic wet season; on average, more than half the citys annual precipitation falls in July and August. The National Stadium, a tangled-looking lattice of monumental steelwork known as the s Nest, is open to the skies. The original design, by groundbreaking Swiss architecture firm Herzog de Meuron, included a retractable roof that was eventually scrapped in a cost-cutting maneuver.

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