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Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China
In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of fifteen million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. Drawing on a rich collection of archival documents, memoirs, and oral interviews, Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change.
292 pages, Hardcover
Published June 25, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 3, 2020
"[Q]uickly build the Third Front, so that Chairman Mao can sleep well."
-Slogan posted inside the Shanghai Electrical Instrument Factory
The Third Front Campaign 三线建设 was a political campaign starting in 1964 and concluded in the early 1970s. To sum up, it was a program of crash industrialization and investment in the defense industry and heavy industry, all built in the remote mountainous interior. This program was informed by Mao's own paranoia over foreign policy and China's strained foreign relations with both the Soviet Union and the United States. Mao feared invasion from the north, along the Soviet border, and along the coast, from the United States. As a result, heavy industries and those that were vital for military supply were all built within the remote mountainous interior. Steel factories, weapons plants, power generation - all built near mountains, underground, and with complexes dispersed across wide stretches of barely inhabited terrain.
All this was supposed to be a national secret - thousands of workers were pulled from their factories and homes near the coast and sent to the mountainous interior. Vast sums were poured into this grand project of national defense - just four years after a catastrophic famine, and with a country still facing shortages of consumer goods and housing. Meyskens addresses this at the top level - Mao cajoling the other members of the government for more people and money, often lamenting that he couldn't sleep easy with China's enemies surrounding him. (Hence the slogan.)
Aside from this top-level discussion found in historical archives and publications, Meyskens has interviewed hundreds of participants and local officials. Many were thrilled to work on such a prestigious project, though many yearned for home, made excuses for health reasons not to go, or chafed under grueling work conditions. There is a line about some concerns that easterners couldn't handle Sichuan's spicy food.
Ultimately, Meyskens uncovers the program's mixed legacy - on the one hand, the programs were incredibly costly and for moderate gain, and many of these were abandoned even before the Deng era of reforms. Meyskens proposes that the warming of relations under the Nixon presidency and later were enough to assuage the government's existential concerns about a two-front war. While some of the programs were later abandoned due to their extreme cost, poor construction, or to their blatant inefficiency, some factories from this period have survived in the current, more competitive era of the Chinese economy.
On one level of reading this book, there is Mao's grand decision-making and government action. On the second, there is a look at how ordinary people felt and acted while working on this campaign. On the third level, there is a connection a reader can draw between economic policy and foreign policy. This was not really a traditional program of "development", it is comparable to war mobilization. It is Mao fretting about what Stalin could or could not do before the Germans invaded in 1941 and talking about an imminent global war. Relations between China and the United States are deteriorating to their worst point in decades, with a war of closed consulates, fragile trade deals, and vast sanctions over such organizations as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (which is mentioned in this book). While we're still a way from the kind of war Mao feared, the threats of foreign policy influencing development are now closer in mind.
There was limited scholarship in English about the Third Front until this book was published - an iconic paper by Barry Naughton was published in 1988 - and this volume addresses a major gap in the economic history of China in this period. It bridges the gap between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and I could easily compare it to Kotkin's book on Magnitogorsk. Given the closure of archival sources - and how, sadly, the interview subjects are growing old - this will be a standard book on the subject in English for years to come.
-Slogan posted inside the Shanghai Electrical Instrument Factory
The Third Front Campaign 三线建设 was a political campaign starting in 1964 and concluded in the early 1970s. To sum up, it was a program of crash industrialization and investment in the defense industry and heavy industry, all built in the remote mountainous interior. This program was informed by Mao's own paranoia over foreign policy and China's strained foreign relations with both the Soviet Union and the United States. Mao feared invasion from the north, along the Soviet border, and along the coast, from the United States. As a result, heavy industries and those that were vital for military supply were all built within the remote mountainous interior. Steel factories, weapons plants, power generation - all built near mountains, underground, and with complexes dispersed across wide stretches of barely inhabited terrain.
All this was supposed to be a national secret - thousands of workers were pulled from their factories and homes near the coast and sent to the mountainous interior. Vast sums were poured into this grand project of national defense - just four years after a catastrophic famine, and with a country still facing shortages of consumer goods and housing. Meyskens addresses this at the top level - Mao cajoling the other members of the government for more people and money, often lamenting that he couldn't sleep easy with China's enemies surrounding him. (Hence the slogan.)
Aside from this top-level discussion found in historical archives and publications, Meyskens has interviewed hundreds of participants and local officials. Many were thrilled to work on such a prestigious project, though many yearned for home, made excuses for health reasons not to go, or chafed under grueling work conditions. There is a line about some concerns that easterners couldn't handle Sichuan's spicy food.
Ultimately, Meyskens uncovers the program's mixed legacy - on the one hand, the programs were incredibly costly and for moderate gain, and many of these were abandoned even before the Deng era of reforms. Meyskens proposes that the warming of relations under the Nixon presidency and later were enough to assuage the government's existential concerns about a two-front war. While some of the programs were later abandoned due to their extreme cost, poor construction, or to their blatant inefficiency, some factories from this period have survived in the current, more competitive era of the Chinese economy.
On one level of reading this book, there is Mao's grand decision-making and government action. On the second, there is a look at how ordinary people felt and acted while working on this campaign. On the third level, there is a connection a reader can draw between economic policy and foreign policy. This was not really a traditional program of "development", it is comparable to war mobilization. It is Mao fretting about what Stalin could or could not do before the Germans invaded in 1941 and talking about an imminent global war. Relations between China and the United States are deteriorating to their worst point in decades, with a war of closed consulates, fragile trade deals, and vast sanctions over such organizations as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (which is mentioned in this book). While we're still a way from the kind of war Mao feared, the threats of foreign policy influencing development are now closer in mind.
There was limited scholarship in English about the Third Front until this book was published - an iconic paper by Barry Naughton was published in 1988 - and this volume addresses a major gap in the economic history of China in this period. It bridges the gap between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and I could easily compare it to Kotkin's book on Magnitogorsk. Given the closure of archival sources - and how, sadly, the interview subjects are growing old - this will be a standard book on the subject in English for years to come.
May 14, 2021
Great and Informative Read!
Very well researched account of a largely unknown, yet strategically relevant set of decisions and actions by China during The Cold War. Highly recommended.
Very well researched account of a largely unknown, yet strategically relevant set of decisions and actions by China during The Cold War. Highly recommended.
October 23, 2020
A great book with great stories, writing, and contributions to the field. Really helps us better understand the largest economic project of the entirety of the Mao years of the PRC’s history. Also inputs a lot of great knowledge on our understandings of national defense during the Mao years.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews