Not content with simply making it rain, now China's weather modifiers have taken on another meterological mission: to help guarantee perfect weather when Beijing hosts the Olympic Games in 2008. "In China, we haven’t done this type of thing on a very large scale yet," says Zhang during an interview in a west Beijing compound housing five antiaircraft guns used to shoot chemicals into the clouds. "The Russians have experience creating good weather, and we can learn something from them. We still have two more years for testing. I’m sure our preparations for the Games will go well."

Zhang's office, which employs 30 people, is part of the Beijing municipal government and the nationwide China Meteorological Administration. Her unit uses two aircraft and 20 artillery and rocket-launching bases to help modify weather around the city. Springtime is the busiest season for agricultural purposes. But more and more, Zhang and her colleagues are experimenting with weather modification to try to create blue skies. Toward this end, they’ve spent nearly a month and a half total researching the effects of certain chemical activators on different sizes of cloud formations and at different altitudes. Chinese meteorologists claim that similar efforts helped create good weather for a number of past VIP events in China, including the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.

Today Chinese rainmakers are among the world’s busiest. Beijing's nationwide weather-modification budget exceeds $50 million a year. The communist regime’s 11th Five Year Plan, which kicked off this year, calls for the creation of 48 billion to 60 billion cubic meters of artificial rain annually (somewhere between 12 trillion to 16 trillion gallons of water). Beijing needs it. Right now is when fruit trees and crops need life-giving water; the parched North China plain has been stalked by drought since 1998. Normal precipitation is between 22 and 24 inches annually, says Zhang, but Beijing had only 18 inches last year. And drought continued around China’s capital city this spring, “so we’re increasing rainfall using our own means,� says Zhang. “But man-made efforts can’t solve the drought problem altogether; they can increase rainfall by only 10 to 15 percent.�

And tampering with Mother Nature has been known to backfire. Cloud-seeding shells and rockets have sometimes gone astray, damaging homes and injuring inhabitants. City dwellers have raised concerns about environmental pollution, though meteorologists insist the silver iodide is used in such tiny quantities that it brings no negative health consequences. And the rainmaking scramble became so intense in 2004 that five Henan province villages reportedly squabbled over “cloud theft� after they all seeded the clouds simultaneously but only one district received the lion’s share of rain.