In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of nuclear war after American spy planes discovered that the Kremlin had stationed medium-range atomic missiles on the communist island of Cuba in the Caribbean, barely over the horizon from Florida.

The governments of both mainland China and of Taiwan have turned their civilisation’ into a national heritage, in different but often converging ways. But civilisation was transmitted before without its being a tradition’ (chuantong) or a material and non-material heritage in the UNESCO-speak that prevails. Sinocentric views of civilisation speak a language of national pride and exaggeration of longevity and continuity, just as do Eurocentric and other nationalist views of their civilisations. All these claims need to be taken with at least pinches of salt. This article will be a handful of salt. Taking a more dispassionate and distanced concept of civilisation, which most importantly does not judge from the standpoint of any one civilisation and certainly not just from a civilisational elite in pronouncing what is and is not civilised but includes all ranks in a civilisational hierarchy as subjects of that civilisation and of aspirations within it, I shall seek answers to what has happened to civilisation in China under its present government. I will focus on the People's Republic of China.

Chimi↑Pom, the young Japanese art provocateurs’ collective, first attained notoriety in 2008, when they hired a small plane to fly over Hiroshima to draw the word Pika (an onomatopoetic for the atomic flash) in smoke against skies once dwarfed by the mushroom cloud. Their un-announced “art prank,” which they filmed for a video art project, drew sharp rebukes for its insensitivity to the hibakusha community and the group of five men and one woman had to publicly apologize. That was three years before the great trifecta of earthquake, tsunami and meltdown jolted the nation's consciousness into a re-evaluation of their singular nuclear history and vulnerability. Since March 11th, 2011, the group has responded by deploying their deceptive amateurism (none has attended art school and all have day jobs) to detonate Japan's post-3/11 taboos. In the PBS Frontline program “Atomic Artists”