The War on Weather: Meteorological Secrecy and Social Life in World War II-Era Coastal China

This paper rethinks China’s experience in World War II by examining how the war transformed the Chinese public’s access to environmental knowledge. Bridging the history of meteorology with the environmental history of WWII, it argues that the wartime state produced new forms of environmental vulnerability in China by restricting access to weather forecasts and meteorological information. In the 1930s, Chinese meteorologists sought to popularize weather knowledge to reach a wider audience and to improve the timeliness and accuracy of weather forecasts to serve farmers and fisherfolk. The outbreak of a full-scale war against Japan in 1937, however, brought this process to a halt. The importance of meteorological data for military strategy soon rendered weather forecasts highly guarded state secrets in both China and Japan. Drawing on scientific writings, meteorological reports, state documents, and newspapers in Chinese, Japanese, and English, this paper traces the long-term consequences of meteorological secrecy in wartime China. While alliances between China and the U.S. expanded transnational exchanges of weather data and meteorological knowledge among military actors, ordinary people, especially coastal communities vulnerable to typhoons, were increasingly excluded from accessing the information needed to anticipate and respond to climatic risks. By foregrounding the social consequences of meteorological secrecy, this paper establishes WWII as a pivotal moment in the militarization of the environment in China, with its legacy felt even decades later.